Engineering a platform for mission planning of autonomous and resilient quadrotors

Quadrotors and UAVs in general are becoming as attractive instruments to safely and efficiently perform environmental monitoring missions. In professional use, quadrotors are manually controlled by expert operators via a remote controller. In research, several projects provide various degrees of automation for the execution of the mission; however, those projects are based on the use of programming languages which are too distant from the background of the stakeholders operating in the field (e.g., fire fighters, policemen, etc.). In this paper we propose FLYAQ, a platform enabling to (i) graphically define monitoring missions via a web interface, (ii) decompose the mission according to the number and nature of available quadrotors, and (iii) generate the implementation code orchestrating all the quadrotors of the swarm to fulfil the common goal of the mission. The FLYAQ platform enables operators to focus on the mission itself, rather than on technical concerns arising from the use of quadrotors. A reconfiguration engine is specifically designed to make the swarm resilient to faults and external events that may compromise the mission. Moreover, under some limitations explained in the paper, the reconfiguration engine permits to change the mission at run-time. The FLYAQ platform will be distributed as an open-source product. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.