A Web Application for the Remote Control of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are receiving an increasing attention from the research and industry community, and today they are adopted for several civilian and military applications. However, state of the art technologies are still based on a single UAV either directly controlled by the human operator or supervised through the manual definition of a flight plan. As a result, scalability is still a significant limitation for such systems, especially when large areas need to be monitored. In this paper we propose a web based application for the control of multiple UAVs. The application has three layers. The first layer allows the user to remotely submit a monitoring mission through a web interface. The second layer optimizes the assignment of the mission to the available UAVs. Finally, the last layer translates the output of the optimization problem into actual flight commands for the UAVs. We implemented our application on a real testbed based on 3DR Solo drones. Results show that the framework scales well with respect to the number of UAVs, the number of concurrent missions and the quality of data to be collected. We observed up to 50% performance improvements in terms of relevant performance metrics such as mission completion time and battery discharge.