A Cloud Based Service for Management and Planning of Autonomous UAV Missions in Smart City Scenarios

Cloud Robotics is an emerging paradigm in which robots, seen as abstract agents, have the possibility to connect to a common network and share on a complex infrastructure the information and knowledge they gather about the physical world; or conversely consume the data collected by other agents or made available on accessible database and repositories. In this paper we propose an implementation of an emergency-management service exploiting the possibilities offered by cloud robotics in a smart city scenario. A high-level cloud-platform manages a number of unmanned aerial vehicles (quadrotor UAVs) with the goal of providing aerial support to citizens that require it via a dedicated mobile app. The UAV reaches the citizen while forwarding a realtime video streaming to a privileged user (police officer),connected to the same cloud platform, that is allowed to teleoperate it by remote.