Enabling Cooperative Awareness for Miniature UAVs with BLE5: Range Analysis and Experimental Measurement

The small lightweight Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to become useful in many modern autonomous solutions, such as traffic management, inspections, surveillance, photography and videography. With the aerospace becoming more and more populated, and with the introduction of autonomous UAVs, most of these solutions will benefit from the cooperation with other UAVs, or at least with a base station. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has a high potential in providing connectivity for light UAVs due to its low power consumption. We propose to implement a modified Cooperative Awareness (CA) messaging scheme on a nRF52840 BLE transceiver, which can be integrated to a lightweight UAV. We specifically use extended advertising to support the Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) payload. In this research, we observe the Packet Error Rate (PER) performance analytically and experimentally. The results show that the implementation is able to carry sufficient amount of information to support safety applications and in doing so, is able to support a distance up to 90 meters.