Collaborative microdrones: applications and research challenges

Microdrones are small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carrying payloads such as cameras and sensors. Such microdrones enable us to obtain a bird’s eye view of the environment which is helpful in many applications such as environmental monitoring, surveillance or disaster management. This position paper reports on our recently launched project “collaborative microdrones” where we are developing a system for aerial imaging based on cooperating, wireless networked microdrones that can be used in disaster management applications. Several microdrones will fly in formation over the area of interest and deliver sensor data which is fused, analyzed and delivered to the user in real-time. In this paper we briefly discuss applications for UAVs, present related projects, introduce our research focus and report on preliminary results.