Cloud-Based Drone Management System in Smart Cities

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, can be used to complete several different military tasks to the industry with numerous studies available in the literature. With the accelerated development of technologies, especially computing, sensing, the Internet of things (IoT), and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), the demand for using drones has been increased in real-world applications. However, there will be more accidents when more drones are active in the sky. Therefore, it is essential to manage drones in operation areas, especially the urban environment. This research introduces an approach, called a cloud-based approach for managing drones in a smart city. This approach is based on the cloud devices and services such as computation, storage, and web services. A ground control station controls and monitors drones, allowing users to define path planning and achieve the information from drone’s sensors. Users, or remoted pilots, can create paths or missions for drones, saved, and transferred to a connected drone. This approach lets users control and monitor drones as connected objects in a real-time environment. An experimental study of monitoring and controlling drones via the Internet (4G D-com Viettel) has been carried out, aiming to evaluate the real-time performance of monitoring and controlling drones. The experimental results have illustrated that the proposed method is a cloud solution that enables to manage and control drones in a real-time environment. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.