Multiple UAVs-based Surveillance and
Reconnaissance System Utilizing IoT Platform
Jong-Hong Park, Sung-Chan Choi, Il-Yeop Ahn, and Jaeho Kim
IoT Platform Research Center
Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI)
Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea
jonghong@keti.re.kr, csc@keti.re.kr, iyahn@keti.re.kr, jhkim@keti.re.kr
Abstract—In recent years, as interest in Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs) has increased, the development of UAV-based
services in traffic monitoring, military defense, disaster
prevention, logistics, and agricultural area has begun to be of
interest. The main characteristic of these services is that it is
effective to provide based on a plurality of UAVs rather than a
single UAV. In addition, in order to expand the service provision,
different types of UAVs, not the UAVs of a particular kind,
should be able to operate in the same service together. In order
for different types of UAVs to receive the same services
efficiently, a standardized platform is needed and services need to
be provided on that platform. In this paper, to address this issue,
the platform based on the oneM2M global standard, which
provides the Internet of Things (IoT) service layer for globally
interoperable IoT solutions, is considered. Based on the global
standard-based platform, we present UAV management and
control system. Furthermore, we implemented an automated
UAV-based surveillance system as an example of a service using
the platform.
Keywords—Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV); Unmanned
Aircraft System (UAS); drone; oneM2M; Internet of Things(IoT);
platform; surveillance and reconnaissance
I. INTRODUCTION
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones,
are expected to provide diverse military, civilian, commercial,
and governmental services. Along with this expectation, the
development of various protocol-based communication devices
and flight control computer (FCC) providing sophisticated
navigation that can be mounted on the UAVs is creating an
environment where unmanned aircraft system (UAS) operators
can receive more sensitive services. Due to this expectation and
the development of devices, many UAS operators and
developers are demanding a system that allows different types
of UAVs to control and manage in the same services
simultaneously. This requirement has led to the necessary to
build a platform for service operation, and many service
providers have built their own platforms to provide their
service to users. DJI's Fighthub[1] is a representative UAS
platform. Flighthub provides flight log and statistics service
through management of flight data of many UAVs and real-
time work environment through pilot management. However,
since Flighthub provides the service for UAVs developed by
DJI, UAVs developed based on open source that most
operators currently use cannot receive the service. Therefore, in
the situation that open source based UAS needs to build a
platform environment that can be easily serviced, we propose a
global standard based IoT platform environment that has
undergone many development stages. Considering UAVs as
well as sensors and devices mounted on the UAVs as things,
users and developers can easily get open source platform
service. Furthermore, we implemented an automated UAV-
based surveillance system as an example of a service using this
open source platform.
II. UAV SERVICE WITH IOT PLATFORM
The most important requirement of the UAV platform is to
provide the common functions required by the service
architecture. In addition, various providers should be able to
manage services and provide convenience to customers
(developers, service users) who will use the services. In other
words, in order for the platform to be widely used, the platform
should provide developers with the functionality they need, and
be able to provide a variety of services at a low cost.
Furthermore, the platform should be able to make it easier for
customers to utilize the various services developed. In this
regard, the IoT platform, which is already being developed or
under development, is a well-prepared candidate for providing
UAV services. From the point of view of IoT, an UAV itself
can be regarded as a thing, and various sensors mounted on the
UAV can also be regarded as things. Furthermore, the concept
of an UAS as a service is possible [2].
There are various IoT platforms currently being
standardized [3]. Among them, platforms that comply with the
oneM2M standard have particular advantages in providing
UAV services compared to existing service provider and
application dependent platforms [4]. The advantages of
oneM2M standard are to prevent fragmentation of the IoT
platform, thereby reducing development and operating costs
and thereby boosting the industry. Based on these advantages,
oneM2M IoT common service standard platform has been
developed. The oneM2M common platform is a layer
architecture style that can be represented as a common service
layer to provide network services and to provide common
functionality to various IoT-based applications [5]. All the
entities in the oneM2M reference architecture are divided into
three tiers, and the function of each entity is defined as follows.
The application entity (AE) provides the application logic for
the end-to-end IoT solution, such as cargo tracking, remote
Fig. 1. The resource browser of Mobius platform.
Fig. 2. The user interface of ground control station.
monitoring, remote meter reading and control, etc. The
common service entity (CSE) is a platform made up of
functions that are commonly used by various application
entities of IoT. A network service entity (NSE) provides
network services to a common service entity.
The CSE incorporates an instantiation of a set of common
services functions (CSFs). The oneM2M CSFs are defined as a
total of 12 functions including registration, discovery, security,
group management, and subscription & notification, etc.
Among these functions, subscription & notification is a useful
function for exchanging data between applications. In the CSE,
many data and services are stored in the form of resources, and
applications can use such resources to read and write data. If an
application is interested in a particular resource and the
resource is automatically changed to a status change, you can
use the subscription functionality provided by the CSE. At this
time, the information that can be subscribed includes an access
history of another entity to the resource to be subscribed, a
property change of the resource, and a change of the child
resource. Similar to the search function, it is defined to set
notification event criteria to notify only the changes satisfying
a certain condition.
In addition, the oneM2M provides Interworking Proxy
Entity (IPE) for interwork with non-oneM2M systems [6]. The
Fig. 3. Scenario of demonstration
IPE is a specialized oneM2M application and it serves any
legacy systems glued with oneM2M platform. Therefore, any
non-standard legacy systems can be accessed and managed
through the oneM2M standard interfaces. Due to the functions
provided by the oneM2M standard, interworking is possible
between a plurality of heterogeneous UAVs in one service, and
they can serve as a mission trigger by notifying and subscribing
to each other.
III. IMPLEMENTATION OF UAV SERVICE
Based on the IoT platform mentioned above, we
implemented a surveillance and reconnaissance service system
using UAVs. In our implementation, two DJI MATRICE 100
are used for patrol and a DJI MAVIC is used for tracking. DJI
provides software development kit (SDK) for developers, and
we used the onboard SDK for MATRICE and the mobile SDK
for MAVIC [7]. The interworking IPE between UAVs and
oneM2M-based UAV management system is running on the
NVIDIA Jetson TX2 [8] on the patrol UAVs. For the oneM2M
platform, we used ‘Mobius’ which is an oneM2M-compliant
IoT server platform provided by OCEAN (open alliance for
IoT standards) [9]. In Mobius platform, users can check the
oneM2M standards-based resource mapping structure through
the resource browser as shown in Fig. 1.
In our case, the AE resource type is used for mapping each
UAV to resource, and container resource type is used for
mapping status, control, detection, and streaming data for
UAV to oneM2M resource. In status container, the values of
the flight data (latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, heading) and
the status data (standby on ground, takeoff, in air, landing,
finishing landing) received from the corresponding UAV are
stored. The control container is used to store the UAV control
command (takeoff, land, return to launch (RTL), waypoint)
received from the user. In detection container, information
about objects detected by the UAV during flight is stored. In
streaming container, the address of the streaming server, which
is the destination to which the video is transmitted through the
camera mounted on the UAV, is stored.
Fig. 4. Image capture of the actual demonstration
In addition, we developed Mobius-based Ground Control
Station (GCS) which can manage and control the UAVs
utilizing the system User Interface (UI) as shown in Fig. 2. The
GCS subscribes to the status resources of all registered AEs
and shows the location and direction of the UAVs on the map.
Also, when click on a specific UAV, a user can give a takeoff,
land, or RTL command by using the button, and can give
waypoint mission by dragging to certain position. When the
Play button is pressed, the GCS receives the address of the
streaming server from the resource and displays the live
streaming screen. The left side of the screen shows information
about objects detected by the camera mounted on the UAVs.
All of the functions provided by GCS are available because the
GCS subscribes to resources for all AEs registered on the
implanted system.
In our implementation, the demonstration scenario is shown
in Fig. 3. First, two patrol UAVs subscribe to the each other's
detection resources, and a tracking UAV subscribes to
detection resources of both Patrol UAVs. The two patrol UAVs
move according to the waypoint mission as the user
commanded through the GCS and continue to perform the
object recognition algorithm. When one of the patrol drones
recognizes a person, the new data is updated in the container
instance of the detection resource. At this time, since both of
the other UAVs are subscribing to detection resource, they will
be notified of new data update. This will cause the remaining
patrol UAV to perform landing commands, and the tracking
UAV will takeoff and move to the position of detecting patrol
UAV automatically. Then, the tracking UAV will perform
active tracking mission following the recognized person. Fig. 4
captures the actual demo video for each step.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we present a high-level view of a UAV-based
IoT platform and implement an example of multiple UAVs
services utilizing the global standards based IoT platform.
While numerous vendors or developers are developing their
own platforms, the presence of a standardized platform is an
essential part of controlling and monitoring multiple
heterogeneous UAVs in terms of linking with other legacy
platforms and spreading UAV services ecosystem. As a key
driving force for the fourth industrial revolution, it is expected
that the value of UAVs will be expanded not only for military
and reconnaissance purposes but also for various services such
as logistics, agriculture and entertainment. In addition, as
UAV-based services become important as future growth
industries, it is important to secure competitiveness through
convergence with IoT platform.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by Unmanned Vehicles
Advanced Core Technology Research and Development
Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF), Unmanned Vehicle Advanced Research Center
(UVARC) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT, the
Republic of Korea (2017M1B3A2A01049996) and
(2018M1B3A1A02937507).
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