UAV networks in rescue missions

Abstract

Small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have received high attention by the robotics community for delivering sensory data of limited size. Yet, the communication capabilities of off-the-shelf UAVs are insufficient for high volume data, such as images and videos. In this demo, we present our networking solution to this problem, residing next to the auto-pilot, and able to create an ad-hoc multi-hop network of UAVs. We show the effectiveness of our implementation in two representative scenarios of rescue missions: [(i)] the establishment of end-to-end connectivity for a smartphone in an area with network outage and the delivery of a high-resolution video of a supervised area from a flying UAV to the ground station.