Principles, Paradigms and the Future of UAV Drone Teams in Use for Engineering and Operation of Landscape-Scale Deployable Structures

TL;DR

This paper explores the principles, paradigms, and future directions for UAV drone teams in automating the deployment and maintenance of large-scale landscape structures, emphasizing a digital platform approach.

Contribution

It introduces a computational thinking framework for designing drone team architectures supporting landscape-scale structure operations.

Findings

Proposes a digital multi-sided platform model for drone team organization.

Highlights the importance of scalable drone fleets for large infrastructure tasks.

Suggests a computational approach to engineering drone team architectures.

Abstract

Drone fleets, with counts on the order of O(100) to O(1000), will play important and significant roles in the automation of the deployment, operation, maintenance and repair of ubiquitous and pervasive landscape scale elongated structures, with the longest linear spatial dimensions of O(1 mile) to O(10 mile). The organization of the drone team to support the task is considered as a digital platform, (specifically, a digital multi-sided platform). A computational thinking approach is used to engineer the architecture of the platform.