BUBBLES's communication platform proof of concept
Ribeiro, Pedro Alexandre Gonçalves
MSc Thesis · 2021 · University of Coimbra
Supervisor: Tiago José dos Santos Martins da Cruz
Abstract
A drone, also referred to as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), constitutes an aircraft that can either fly autonomously or be remotely controlled by human input (as it is often the case for Visual Line-of-Sight control).These systems have been growing in popularity over the past years, with many considering that we are near the inflection point that will unleash the explosion of commodity UAV-supported services. For this to be accomplished, there is a need for a new set of services and infrastructure capable of deploying multiple drones and maintaining control over what they are doing. As such, there is the need to develop a supporting infrastructure capable of making sure that they operate efficiently and safely - that is the objective of BUBBLES. BUBBLES aims to provide invisible bubbles for drones to fly safely and efficiently, avoiding dangerous collision incidents. To ensure proper separation between UAVs and also other kinds of traffic, BUBBLES will need to get drone telemetry information during its mission continuously. For this to happen, there needs to be a communication platform connecting the drones and services offered by BUBBLES. This thesis describes the work done into building the communication platform and the work into a test environment to help validate BUBBLE's vision. The development goals aim to propose and develop a proof of concept capable of handling all the traffic even in the most challenging situations.The validation goals provide the environment to test the solution in different scenarios with different levels of risk to verify that the BUBBLES vision can be achieved.