Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones with cameras, are crucial for environmental awareness in applications like smart agriculture, border security, and disaster response. Building realistic UAV testbeds for novel network control algorithms is challenging due to time constraints and regulatory limitations. To develop an autonomous air-to-ground coordination platform, in this paper, we introduce a UAV-swarm-aided Disaster Response Platform (DRP) that simulates video transmission and coordination that integrates simulation for both drones and networks, allowing experimentation with protocols (HTTP/TCP, UDP/RTP, QUIC) and video properties (codec, resolution). Our design combined human-centered interaction principles, prioritizing user experience and indicating multi-modal interactions. In addition, our approach utilizes trace-based experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness in delivering video quality (e.g., PSNR) aligning with real-world measurements, while in the meantime validating model accuracy. Evaluation results demonstrate that our intelligent video transmission and air-to-ground coordination strategies present reasonable video quality under measurement of subjective and objective metrics, and in the meantime achieve approximate to 85% accuracy with dynamic decision-making with competitive time efficiency and energy savings (approximate to 18% gain) compared to on-boarding only. Implementing these strategies in UAV-swarm-aided DRPs significantly enhances overall response efficiency, ensuring the safety of lives and property.
