A service-oriented Cloud-based management system for the Internet-of-Drones

Deploying drones over the Cloud is an emerging research area motivated by the emergence of Cloud Robotics and the Internet-of-Drones (IoD) paradigms. This paper contributes to IoD and to the deployment of drones over the cloud. It presents, Dronemap Planner, an innovative service-oriented cloud based drone management system that provides access to drones through web services (SOAP and REST), schedule missions and promotes collaboration between drones. A modular cloud proxy server was developed; it acts as a moderator between drones and users. Communication between drones, users and the Dronemap Planner cloud is provided through the MAVLink protocol, which is supported by commodity drones. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Dronemap Planner, we implemented and validated it using simulated and real MAVLink-enabled drones, and deployed it on a public cloud server. Experimental results show that Dronemap Planner is efficient in virtualizing the access to drones over the Internet, and provides developers with appropriate APIs to easily program drones' applications.