During the mating season, honeybee males, the drones, gather in congregation areas 10-40 m above ground. When a receptive female, a queen, enters the congregation, drones are attracted to her by queen-produced pheromones and visual cues and attempt to mate with the queen in mid-air. It is still unclear how drones and queens find the congregations. Visual cues on the horizon are most probably us...

Drones are unmanned aircraft controlled remotely or operated autonomously. While the extant literature suggests that drones can in principle invade people’s privacy, little is known about how people actually think about drones. Drawing from a series of in-depth interviews conducted in the United States, we provide a novel and rich account of people’s pri­ vacy perceptions of drones for civilian...

We introduce a package service model where trucks as well as drones can deliver packages. Drones can travel on trucks or fly; but while flying, drones can only carry one package at a time and have to return to a truck to charge after each delivery. We present a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem of finding a good schedule for all drones and trucks. The algorithm is based on two nested loc...

In this paper we demonstrate the use of Hive as a novel basis for creating multi-sensor vision systems. Hive is a framework in which reusable modules called drones are defined and connected together to create larger systems. Drones are simple to implement, perform a specific task and using the powerful interface of Hive can be combined to create sophisticated vision pipelines. We present a set ...

Low-cost mini-drones with advanced sensing and maneuverability enable a new class of intelligent sensing systems. Œis trend motivated several research e‚orts to employ drones as standalone systems or to assist legacy deployments. However, several fundamental challenges remain unsolved including: 1) Adequate coverage of sizable targets; 2) Target orientation that render coverage e‚ective only fr...

Learning visual cues constitutes a vital ability of bees to orientate in space and to recognize nest sites, food sources and mating partners. To study learning and memory in bees under controlled environmental conditions, the proboscis extension reaction (PER) assay provides a well-established behavioral approach. While many studies exist about olfactory learning, only little is known about PER...

We study a cellular networking scenario, called DroneCells, where miniaturized base stations (BSs) are mounted on flying drones to serve mobile users. We propose that the drones never stop, and move continuously within the cell in a way that reduces the distance between the BS and the serving users, thus potentially improving the spectral efficiency of the network. By considering the practical ...

This paper takes up the increasingly popular topic of drones – including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), and a vast panoply of commercial drones and copters – to argue that our analysis should lie not so much on drones as objects, but as assemblages of the vertical. Drones, I argue, constitute a socio-technical assemblage o...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are proliferating. Several applications, such as surveillance, disaster management, and drone racing, place high requirements on the communication with the drones – in terms of throughout, reliability, 3D connectivity, and latency. Existing wireless technologies, notably WiFi, that are currently used for drone communications are limited to short range...

In this paper, the effective use of multiple quadrotor drones as an aerial antenna array that provides wireless service to ground users is investigated. In particular, under the goal of minimizing the airborne service time needed for communicating with ground users, a novel framework for deploying and operating a drone-based antenna array system whose elements are single-antenna drones is propo...