AERO: AI-Enabled Remote Sensing Observation with Onboard Edge Computing in UAVs

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with computer vision capabilities have been widely utilized in several remote sensing applications, such as precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and surveillance. However, the commercial usage of these UAVs in such applications is mostly performed manually, with humans being responsible for data observation or offline processing after data collection due to the lack of on board AI on edge. Other technical methods rely on the cloud computation offloading of AI applications, where inference is conducted on video streams, which can be unscalable and infeasible due to remote cloud servers’ limited connectivity and high latency. To overcome these issues, this paper presents a new approach to using edge computing in drones to enable the processing of extensive AI tasks onboard UAVs for remote sensing. We propose a cloud–edge hybrid system architecture where the edge is responsible for processing AI tasks and the cloud is responsible for data storage, manipulation, and visualization. We designed AERO, a UAV brain system with onboard AI capability using GPU-enabled edge devices. AERO is a novel multi-stage deep learning module that combines object detection (YOLOv4 and YOLOv7) and tracking (DeepSort) with TensorRT accelerators to capture objects of interest with high accuracy and transmit data to the cloud in real time without redundancy. AERO processes the detected objects over multiple consecutive frames to maximize detection accuracy. The experiments show a reduced false positive rate (0.7%), a low percentage of tracking identity switches (1.6%), and an average inference speed of 15.5 FPS on a Jetson Xavier AGX edge device.