Designing a Drone Control Station for Team Missions with Educational Drones

초록

Highlights What are the main findings? We present design processes, modeling artifacts, and a reference implementation for developing a drone control station to address the lack of team mission control among educational drones. The experimental result shows that the centralized architecture of the drone control station is feasible but limited when performing a team mission due to its hardware limitations. Still, the architecture is helpful for educational purposes. What are the implications of the main findings? Drone software developers, educators, and students may adopt or reuse our presented design to control multiple educational drones. Low-cost educational drones can successfully execute team missions when paired with the appropriate communication strategy.Highlights What are the main findings? We present design processes, modeling artifacts, and a reference implementation for developing a drone control station to address the lack of team mission control among educational drones. The experimental result shows that the centralized architecture of the drone control station is feasible but limited when performing a team mission due to its hardware limitations. Still, the architecture is helpful for educational purposes. What are the implications of the main findings? Drone software developers, educators, and students may adopt or reuse our presented design to control multiple educational drones. Low-cost educational drones can successfully execute team missions when paired with the appropriate communication strategy.Abstract Educational drones have become increasingly important in education and research due to their affordability, user-friendly design and control, and potential use as tools in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) learning. For example, CoDrone EDUs are used to teach basic programming principles and drone control to high school or university students. As drones in real-world applications often collaborate to solve problems, controlling multiple educational drones in a team is crucial and beneficial for enhancing students' problem-solving and design skills. However, these educational drones primarily rely on one-to-one control via a radio-frequency remote controller, and programming libraries for coordinating multi-drone missions are limited, posing challenges for students or developers in controlling them effectively. To address the lack of control in missions with multiple educational drones, we present a drone control station (DCS), featuring a centralized architecture that connects and controls various drones. We first develop scenarios and use cases that utilize multiple drones, specifying the system requirements. We then design conceptual models and architectures for the DCS. Next, we implement the DCS and evaluate whether it achieves the team missions. Experimental results show that the DCS with the centralized architecture is suitable for team missions with multiple educational drones. We expect the approach in our work to serve as a method for controlling multi-drone missions in an educational environment.

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