Team-level Programming of Drone Sensor Networks

Autonomous drones are a powerful new breed of mo-bile sensing platform that can greatly extend the capa-bilities of traditional sensing systems. Unfortunately, it is still non-trivial to coordinate multiple drones to perform a task collaboratively. We present a novel programming model called team-level programming that can express collaborative sensing tasks without expos-ing the complexity of managing multiple drones, such as concurrent programming, parallel execution, scaling, and failure recovering. We create the Voltron pro-gramming system to explore the concept of team-level programming in active sensing applications. Voltron offers programming constructs to create the illusion of a simple sequential execution model while still maximiz-ing opportunities to dynamically re-task the drones as needed. We implement Voltron by targeting a popu-lar aerial drone platform, and evaluate the resulting sys-tem using a combination of real deployments, user stud-ies, and emulation. Our results indicate that Voltron enables simpler code and produces marginal overhead in terms of CPU, memory, and network utilization. In addition, it greatly facilitates implementing correct and complete collaborative drone applications, compared to existing drone programming systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.2 [Programming languages]: Language clas-sifications—Concurrent, distributed, and parallel lan-guages; C.3 [Special-purpose and application-based systems]: [Real-time and embedded systems