Digital Twin Design for Autonomous Drones

The rapid adoption of technology led to the rapid growth of various fields, including Unnamed Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Digital Twin (DT) became a popular concept to facilitate this progress, serving as a virtual replica of the physical drones to support run-time compliance checking, coordination, and analysis in trustworthy UAV design and operation. Nevertheless, the DT technology in UAV often lacks a precise specification and clear explanation of its characteristics, parameters, and functionalities. To address this gap, this paper investigates current research in DT applications for autonomous drones and compiles the findings towards the design of a DT to support the UAV sector. To this end, we extract the DT characteristics from existing papers and leverage these insights to propose a DT design for autonomous drones. The resulting DT is foundational in facilitating seamless collaboration and decision-making among collaborating autonomous drones in autonomous ecosystems to ensure safe and trustworthy operation, as demonstrated in a proof of concept, demonstrated through a case study of logistics shipment, showcasing the DT application for autonomous drones’ collaboration in autonomous ecosystems.