About

The ability of UAVs (drones) to autonomously move sensor/actuator payloads in space makes them ideal platforms for next-generation IoT applications. However, the current usage paradigm, where usually the drone is associated with a human operator who directly controls the mission, poses significant operational overheads and limitations when (a) more than one drone is required, (b) a mission should run periodically or on-demand based on an event, (c) the mission is dynamic and should be adapted automatically based on the data collected from the drone or external sources such as ground sensors, and (d) the collaboration/coordination between ground personnel (non-pilots) and the drone is required. The need for the above application characteristics (separately or in combination) has started to emerge and will increase in the forthcoming years as digitalization penetrates every aspect of life. Indicative application domains range from surveillance to industrial process monitoring and last-mile delivery.

Solution & Product

Our solution transforms the current drone usage paradigm by replacing the pilot with a program that executes a mission in a holistic way, besides just the drone's flight plan. The mission program collects data from various data sources, takes high-level control decisions according to the application objectives, and instructs drones as well as personnel (e.g., through their smartphones or augmented displays) to perform the necessary actions in the field. The data sources can be ground or airborne sensors, smartphones, data streams from processing pipelines and Internet-based services. To support such functionality, we have developed the FlyByCode platform, an advanced middleware stack for ground stations and drones offering powerful programming abstractions inspired by the teamwork paradigm where a group of people is coordinated by a supervisor work to achieve a goal. Our stack spans across drone-edge-cloud and, through suitable automation mechanisms, undertakes the management and control of all mission entities.

Innovation & Scalability

To our knowledge, we are one of the first companies to provide such holistic functionality in a product, not as a lab or research prototype. Our core differentiation from the competition lies in that our model replaces how drones are used today by integrating UAVs as part of a holistic mission. At the technical level, our stack allows mission programs to be written once, irrespectively to the number of drones that will be used at runtime, allowing the addition of new participating drones or personnel even dynamically during a mission. The software is designed to be extensible and flexible customizable to support different vertical application domains. Also, a given vertical solution can be replicated in different locations of the same customer or be re-targeted to different customers in the same application domain, with minimal effort in development, ideally only requiring simple reconfiguration.

Traction & achievements

We have completed our first pilot where we successfully adapted the surveillance archetype for the perimeter inspection of a large fish farm. The pilot was running for almost a year with one drone and one guard. Using a suitable application, the guard could start a surveillance round, watch the live stream of the drone’s camera, pause the flight of the drone and lower its altitude in order to better observe a certain spot of the fish farm, and resume the surveillance mission. Also, the guard could abort the mission at any point in time. Notably, the actual control of the drone, including take-off, flight and landing, was performed exclusively via our software stack. Besides the surveillance vertical, we have a close collaboration with a drone company for the development of a UAV with vertical-take-off-and-landing (VTOL) capability to support the archetype for long-range delivery and surveillance missions with an operational autonomy of up to 6 hours.

Team & Why Us

We are a small group of engineers with significant research and development expertise in software architectures and end-to-end software development, spanning embedded systems, distributed systems, pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems, wireless sensor networks and drone-based systems. Our team works together for 10+ years building systems that actually work, and has considerable experience in core technology projects, having participated in several EU and national R&D projects carrying out complex IoT system development.

Funding Needs

We are seeking strategic collaborations with reliable partners to further develop our stack and pursue specific application verticals. We are also seeking participation in European and National research projects to apply/customize our stack and expand the network of collaborators.