Abstract
Drones are rapidly finding their way into civilian applications, and are mostly networked, enabling their remote programming, and connectivity with humans. However, drones are limited by the weight they can carry and battery power resulting in limited resources. Moreover, some applications require utilising multiple drones to act in coordination. The combination of utilising nearby devices (i.e. with additional resources beyond the drone capability) and controlling multiple drones in a more convenient way has the potential to overcome these limitations. This paper proposes and examines programmable crowd-powered drones, involving two key concepts for combining drones and smartphones as a crowd-powered resource cloud. In particular, we focus on crowdsourcing for drone computations, and multi-drone service management using a new scripting language for coordinated flight paths of multiple drones. We describe our underlying model and experimentation with these concepts. We then extensively discuss the prospect of drones servicing communities within IoT ecosystems, as a future direction.