A Practical Deployment of a Communication Infrastructure to Support the Employment of Multiple Surveillance Drones Systems

Abstract

In many incidents involving amateur drones (ADr), the big challenge is to quickly deploy a surveillance system that countermeasures the threat and keeps track of the intruders. Depending on the area under concern, launching a single surveillance drone (SDr) to hunt the intruder is not efficient, but employing multiple ones can cope with the problem. However, in order to make this approach feasible, an easy to use mission setup and control station for multiple SDr is required, which by its turn, requires a communication infrastructure able to handle the connection of multiple SDr among themselves and their ground control and payload visualization station. Concerning this Issue, this paper presents a proposal of a network infrastructure to support the operation of multiple SDr and its practical deployment. This infrastructure extends the existing Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) protocol to support multiple connections among the SDrs and between them and a ground control station. Encouraging results are obtained, showing the viability of this proposed protocol extension.