5G and IoT for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used within an Internet of Things (IoT) network where the UAV can communicate with other devices or users over an internet connection. Tasks such as autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance, but also real-time deep learning or next-best-view applications, can be increasingly applied on the edge in a real-time fashion. The introduction of 5g networks is expected to accelerate the range of real-time applications and in addition decrease latency for time-sensitive tasks. Yet, no benchmarks or best practice guidelines are available to direct the design of efficient IoT-enabled UAVs and the UAV Centre wants to know how to prepare ourselves for the 5G-era.
The aim of this topic is to explore and review 5G systems and capabilities, to design a 5G-system that can be implemented on UAV-systems and to carry out experiments that benchmark the performance of the designed system in terms of latency, computational overhead or real-time streaming abilities.
If time permits, the student can implement the system on UAVs from the GeoScienceLab (GSL). From the perspective of Open Science and reproducible science, we ask that the student places their code on our public GitHub. Furthermore, we encourage the student to explain their work through a short video that can be used for dissemination purposes.