Toward UAV-Based Airborne Computing

In recent years, we have witnessed the significant growth of interest in using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to facilitate civilian and commercial applications. To design future UAV systems and applications, advanced UAV functions require powerful on-board computing capability. Nevertheless, most existing UAV functions were designed separately and there is a lack of a general framework to exploit airborne computing for all on-board UAV functions. In this article, we present a comprehensive study to address this issue with the goal to adopt UAV-based airborne computing in a unified way. Specifically, we first generalize the motivations to adopt airborne computing from two perspectives: enhancing UAV functions and enabling new UAV applications. We then discuss how to design and implement future UAV-based airborne computing, in which we present some design guidelines and then propose a three-layer reference model that consists of the mission, task, and function layers so as to simplify the analysis and design of future UAV applications. To support the diverse design requirements for future UAV applications, we introduce our recent work on the development of an open networked airborne computing platform, and we demonstrate our latest prototype with experimental results that confirm the viability of our airborne computing platform.