UAV as a service: Enabling on-demand access and on-the-fly re-tasking of multi-tenant UAVs using cloud services

Abstract

As commercial roles for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become clearer and demand for services provided by them increases, UAVs rely more on new cloud computing services and cooperative coordination to provide mission planning, control, tracking and data processing. This article presents the UAV as a Service (UAVaaS) framework, which ports features commonly found in traditional cloud services, such as Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as a Service, to the domain of UAVs. This work aims to conceptualize and design UAVaaS for commercial applications. Specifically, a cloud-provided orchestration framework that allows multi-tenant UAVs to easily serve multiple, heterogeneous clients at once and automatically re-task them to users with higher priority, mid-flight, if needed. The outcome of this research aims to provide an introductory overview of UAVaaS, explain core protocols and network topologies, and identify key system components and requirements.