Fleets of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, namely drones) are becoming increasingly useful for tasks which require a repeated spatial and temporal acquisition of geo-referred data over large areas. Despite an amazing evolution in the last few years of the onboard computational capacity of drones (in terms of flight stability, maneuverability, real-time obstacle avoidance, navigation, long-distance safe communication, and sensing preprocessing), enabling them to realize missions with full/partial autonomous behavior, many real air-quality monitoring scenarios (from rural to urban and industrial environments) still offer significant challenges which will be studied within this project, to better face complex tasks as coordination among mobile ground robot (UGV) and flying aerial robot (UAV), on-the-fly mission partitioning (maximizing the spatial coverage depending on temporal evolution of events to be monitored),
V2V reliable communication and remote tele-guidance and control. The product 1.2 will be a UAV-based robotic platform for air quality monitoring made of coordinated and semiautonomous drones. According to the air quality monitoring goals of this Project, the Mobile robot (Product 2.1) and Sensor systems (Product 2.4) will take advantage of using such flying robots acting as aerial carriers and distributed data collectors. The number and features of drones to be equipped within this project will depend on the field scenarios (with respect to current at future EASA regulations), and the characteristics of sensors (as payloads) and mobile robot (as monitoring companion and take-off and landing plate). Important properties of such robotic platform to be considered to fulfill its full potential are robustness, adaptivity, resource-efficiency, scalability, cooperativeness, heterogeneity, and self-configurability. To achieve these properties, the physical control of individual UAVs, their navigation, and communication capabilities need to be integrated within a proper standardized set of software libraries, communication protocols and tools (e.g., ROS, and MAVLINK, among others), and properly connected to a proper AI-enhanced GCS (ground control station), more similar to a C3 hub (Command, Control & Communication).The system will be equipped with a user interface for the remote guidance (assisted remote guidance) and the mission setting (autonomous navigation). A communication protocol will be defined in order to allow other partners to start and stop an autonomous mission through TCP/IP messages sent to the Info Solution System.