The future of safe BVLOS drone operations with respect to system and service engineering

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have witnessed a dramatic increase in use over the last 20 years, gradually becoming popular tools for a variety of applications, while they contribute to a remarkable number of scientific advances in engineering, remote sensing, and computer science. Drones are an example of an edge device that uses technologies like visual search, image recognition, object detection, and tracking to provide a variety of solutions, ranging from construction, and traffic monitoring to cartography, among others. In order to develop new services and promote creative business models, BVLOS drones are turning into aerial sensing platforms that produce data and fuse data flows coming from current sensors in order to operate. Given this landscape, the combination of cloud and edge computing resources seems to be a promising solution that addresses computation-intensive offloading and latency difficulties.