Role of public cloud in autonomous UAV Swarm flight management

While the previous articles described the possibilities when the capabilities of individual drones in the UAV swarm are enhanced, it does not call out the role of the cloud. The data the drones send each other over gossip or broadcast protocol is for decentralized co-ordination but this does not do away with the cloud. In fact, without the analytics provided by the cloud, it is not only hard to do efficient mission planning, image processing, real-time updates, and secure communications but also impossible to scale out on those tasks. The cloud does not try to be a central controller; it provides capabilities for processing data that are best taken away from the edge/IoT devices when they are part of drone apparatus and enhances the decision-making processes.

The architecture diagram below is an illustration of this role played by the public cloud.

Figure illustrates separation of concerns for cloud, UAV swarm and users along with their components and dependencies.

Specifically, it allows the UAV task assignment graph to be different from the communication graph within the cloud computing plane. The image/video processing and analytics pipeline is helpful even without a control loop back to the drones for aiding their next round of flight if not near-real-time feedback. The architecture is independent of the models and algorithms used within the components so that the user can bring her own models or leverage retrieval-augmented-generation from the analytics stack comprising of vector stores.

#Codingexercise: https://1drv.ms/w/c/d609fb70e39b65c8/EbHRVcgkqM5GgDxzwnEOhKcBnJW4AuOWbdEVMPATcY4N6w?e=2UzoPB