Our paper entitled “Drone Networks: Communications, Coordination, and Sensing” is accepted for publication in Ad Hoc Networks Journal.
In this paper, we describe a high-level architecture for the design of a collaborative aerial system consisting of drones with on-board sensors and embedded processing, sensing, coordination, and communication and networking capabilities. We implement a multi-drone system consisting of quadcopters and demonstrate its potential in disaster assistance and area monitoring scenarios. Furthermore, we illustrate design challenges and present potential solutions based on the lessons learned so far.