Scalable distributed microservices for autonomous UAV swarms: poster abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are revolutionizing critical industries. Their inexpensive and accessible nature makes them useful for a number of broad applications including agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and more. In response to this popularity, UAV manufacturers, hobbyists, and researchers have developed myriad software packages for UAV control to simplify and automate UAV flight. Recent advances have also led to autonomous UAV that complete complex missions without human pilots and swarms of UAV that work together to solve tasks. Recently, researchers have used autonomy and swarms to allow UAV to cover wide areas quickly and intelligently. Few software packages explicitly support either autonomy and swarming for UAV, and none to our knowledge combine these features. We present early work on SoftwarePilot 2.0, a UAV software package that supports swarms of autonomous UAV. SoftwarePilot 2.0 improves on prior work to expand microservice model designs which are easier to manage using cloud-native technologies. SoftwarePilot 2.0's edge-efficient design allows UAV swarms to easily scale across the edge and cloud, and supports cutting edge autonomy techniques.