THE FlyZone TESTBED ARCHITECTURE FOR AERIAL DRONE APPLICATIONS

摘要

FlyZone is a testbed architecture to support developing aerial drone applications. Its unique features include the ability to emulate the environment influence, which we achieve with a positioning error bound by the size of the smallest drone we test, and the automatic monitoring of safety constraints that mimic obstacles. A custom visual localization technique enables this performance, while a lightweight testbed architecture that maximizes decoupling from the main application facilitates transitioning from testbed to real deployments. We are currently engaged in using FlyZone to test the performance of autonomous navigation algorithms, whose performance was hitherto only measured in simulation, against the emulated environment influence. We argue this is a fundamental step towards the concrete real-world use of this technology.