Autonomous drones are a powerful new breed of mobile sensing platform that can greatly extend the capabilities 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 exposing the complexity of managing multiple drones, such as concurrent programming, parallel execution, scaling, and failure recovering. We create the VOLTRON programming 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 maximizing opportunities to dynamically re-task the drones as needed. We implement VOLTRON by targeting a popular aerial drone platform, and evaluate the resulting system using a combination of real deployments, user studies, 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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.