Management and Coordination Framework for Aerial-Terrestrial Smart Drone Networks

According to the paradigm of Internet of Mobile Things, the paper proposes and investigates a novel framework to support the management and the collaboration of Mobile Smart Objects (MSOs) considered as terrestrial and aerial drones (i.e., UAVs, UGVs) with embedded sensors and/or actuators that can move autonomously remaining always connected, accessible and controllable. The proposed framework allows (i) the network setup and maintenance of smart drones (ii) the mission assignment to a group of smart drones, (iii) the task/role assignment to the different drones involved into a particular mission and (iv) the task/role rearrangement according to specific executive parameters and system conditions (i.e., residual energy, computational power, abilities offered by specific on board sensors). To evaluate the effectiveness and the reliability of the proposed framework, a real testbed was realized using drones commonly available on the market.