Toward a Cloud Platform for UAV Resources and Services

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant attention recently due to the constantly growing range of applications. However, developing collaborative UAV applications built using traditional technologies in tightly coupled designs requires the dedication of huge development efforts, time, and budget. The present research aims to simplify these efforts, and reduce the time and cost needed to develop applications for distributed heterogeneous UAVs. This paper proposes a UAV-Cloud platform and components for distributed UAVs through cloud computing. The UAV-Cloud platform provides a set of services and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) on top of which the applications can be built. Due to the limited capabilities of these UAVs, a lightweight architecture is adopted. UAV resources and services are modeled in a Resource Oriented Architecture. Moreover, this paper proposes a broker layer to separate the requester side from the provider side. To test the proposed architecture, a prototype was built for the UAV resources and the broker layer.