Computing in the Air: an Open Airborne Computing Platform

In recent years, we have witnessed fast-growing unmanned aerial systems (UAS) based applications. To better facilitate these applications, many efforts have been made to enhance the capability of UAS from various aspects, including communications, control and networking, and so on. Nevertheless, most of these studies neglect the computation aspect. Recently, the UAS-enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) has attracted increasing research attention, which utilises UAS with onboard computing capability to provide on-demand computing services for mobile users. However, existing research on UAS-enabled MEC remains at the theory stage and how to design a UAS platform with advanced onboard computing capability has not been addressed. In this study, the authors aim to fill this research gap and design an open UAS-based airborne computing platform with advanced onboard computing capability. This platform was designed from three aspects: hardware, software, and applications. In particular, feasible computing hardware to perform UAS onboard computing is first considered and a prototype is then designed. To enhance the flexibility and programmability of the platform, two key virtualisation techniques are then investigated. Finally, they test the performance of their prototype by executing real UAS onboard computing tasks, the results of which verify the feasibility and potentials of the proposed airborne computing platform.