DePILOT: Above and Beyond Line of Sight Drone Control

Important results from the project

DePILOT explored new means to foster interactions between humans and drones that do not require physical co-location, explicit piloting actions, or constant attention. Current piloting interfaces are limited to low-level flight commands. We laid the basis to break the explicit coupling between drone and pilot by studying to what extent existing communication protocols may provide bounded back-to-back data latency, and by exploring new interfaces that seamlessly enable drone control with higher-level, possibly implicit flight commands and beyond Line of Sight.

Expected long term effects

We gained a thorough understanding and quantitative evidence about the relation of drones to one’s body and about the required network-level support. Concrete outcomes include i) elicitation of system requirements to enable the decoupling of human pilots and drones (bit.ly/2VMk3EC); ii) a thorough study of streaming protocols when deployed on network infrastructures, such as 5G (bit.ly/2ZG5QLB), and iii) a detailed video-based study about how humans and drones interact on an opera stage (bit.ly/2ZD4QLB).

Approach and implementation

The design and implementation of the required system infrastructure allowing the thorough study of streaming protocols when deployed on network infrastructures, such as 5G, on both synthetic network infrastructures and experimental 5G real-world deployments is released as open-source software to foster take-up by universities and industry (bit.ly/2ZG5QLB). This implementation was used to carry out realistic tests with drones in flight (bit.ly/2ZG5QLB).