# On the Feasibility of Infrastructure Assistance to Autonomous UAV Systems

## TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of communication infrastructure to support autonomous UAVs by analyzing flight assistance and task offloading capabilities using a specialized UAV-network simulator.

## Contribution

It provides an in-depth assessment of infrastructure support for UAV autonomy, focusing on communication flow and task offloading via the FlyNetSim simulator.

## Key findings

- Infrastructure can significantly extend UAV operational capabilities.
- Communication support is critical for autonomous flight and task offloading.
- The study highlights the importance of reliable network infrastructure for UAV autonomy.

## Abstract

Infrastructure assistance has been proposed as a viable solution to improve the capabilities of commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), especially toward fully autonomous operations. The airborne nature of these devices imposes constrains limiting the onboard available energy supply and computing power. The assistance of the surrounding communication and computing infrastructure can mitigate such limitations by extending the communication range and taking over the execution of compute-intense tasks. However, autonomous operations impose specific, and rather extreme in some cases, demands to the infrastructure. Focusing on flight assistance and task offloading to edge servers, this paper presents an in-depth evaluation of the ability of the communication infrastructure to support the necessary flow of information from the UAV to the infrastructure. The study is based on our recently proposed FlyNetSim, an open-source UAV-network simulator accurately modeling both UAV and network operations.