Fly4SmartCity: A cloud robotics service for smart city applications

In this paper a possible implementation of a cloud-robotics service in a smart city scenario is proposed, in which small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are employed for emergency management operations. The emerging cloud robotics paradigm considers robots as simple agents connected to a remote network infrastructure; this networked approach allows them to benefit from off-board powerful computational and storage resources on one hand, and to leverage open data about the urban fabric and common knowledge on the other hand. This work describes how the integration of a capable, reliable and stable cloud platform, small unmanned vehicles, high-bandwidth/low-latency mobile networks and open data publicly available on the Internet makes the design of a real-world UAV-based emergency management service possible. Simulated and real experiments show the feasibility of the approach. Legal and operational issues which at present still prevent a practical application of these techniques are also addressed.