SensorFly: Enabling groups of minimalistic semi-controllable flying sensing devices

Distributed sensing applications have become feasible on a large-scale due to the proliferation of both new and existing connected devices in all walks of human life. However, currently this cloud of physical devices must be designed and deployed in an ad-hoc or case-by-case basis reducing their usefulness in applications concerning disasters and rapidly changing environments. This is especially a problem in indoor emergency environments due to the complexity of locations (such as debris, smoke), lack of sensing capability (such as GPS) and relative urgency of the information (location of survivors or fire). In this paper we present SensorFly, a group of small resource-constrained flying devices that can enable unmanned missions in hazardous indoor environments. Due to the limits in weight and size, these devices will need to collaborate in order to allow the system to accomplish their tasks. We present our cross-layer collaboration framework for highly resource constrained semi-controllable sensor nodes targeted towards realizing efficient multi-agent command. Our framework leverages the minimal capability of SensorFly in accomplishing deployment and discovery tasks through a leader-follower coordination scheme. At the same time the framework prioritizes data bandwidth within the system so as to meet latency requirements of the transmitted system data.