A control and communications platform for procedural mission planning with multiple aerial drones

Leveraging recent advances in autonomous flight capabilities of commercially available drone equipment, we report on the development of a modular solution for multi-drone control that implements the functionality required for planning, execution, and monitoring of procedural, multi-step missions with optional drone cooperation. The platform consists of loosely coupled components interacting via message brokers, which we evaluate through a pair of real-life experiments that emulate reference use-cases. We then look into the performance of drone-to-ground communications, with a particular focus on latency. We implement a dedicated, low-resource communications module with efficient serialization protocols and asynchronous message handling, to compare against the built-in message broker approach. Our data shows the importance of low-level prioritization of drone control requests and indicates that message broker approaches may not be suitable for drone swarms.