Mission Specification and Execution of ...

Small  unmanned  aerial  vehicles,  commonly  calleddrones,  enable  novel  applications  in  many  domains.  Multidronesystems  are  a  current  key  trend  where  several  drones  operatecollectively  as  an  integrated  networked  autonomous  system  tocomplete  various  missions.  The  specification  and  execution  ofmultidrone missions are particularly challenging, since substantialexpertise  of  the  mission  domain,  the  drone’s  capabilities,  andthe  drones’  software  environment  is  required  to  properly  encodethe  mission.  In  this  position  paper,  we  introduce  a  specificationlanguage for multidrone missions and describe the transcoding ofits components into the multidrone execution environment for bothsimulations  and  real  drones.  The  key  features  of  our  approachinclude  (i)  domain-independence  of  the  mission  specification,  (ii)readability  and  ease  of  use,  and  (iii)  expandability.  The  specifi-cation  language  has  a  simple  syntax  and  uses  a  parameterizeddescription  of  execution  blocks  and  mission  capabilities,  whichare  derived  from  native  drone  functions.  Domain-independenceand  expandability  are  provided  by  a  clear  separation  betweenthe  specification  and  the  implementation  of  the  mission  tasks.We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a selectedmultidrone  mission  example.