UAV-Based and WebRTC-Based Open Universal Framework to Monitor Urban and Industrial Areas

Nowadays, we are observing a rapid development of UAV-based monitoring systems, which are faced with more and more new tasks, such as high temporal resolution and high spatial resolution of measurements, or Artificial Intelligence on board. This paper presents the open universal framework intended for fast prototyping or building a short series of specialized flying monitoring systems able to work in urban and industrial areas. The proposed framework combines mobility of UAV with IoT measurements and full-stack WebRTC communications. WebRTC offers simultaneous transmission of both a real-time video stream and the flow of data coming from sensors, and ensures a kind of protection of data flow, which leads to preserving its near-real-time character and enables contextual communication. Addition of the AI accelerator hardware makes this system AI-ready, i.e., the IoT communication hub, which is the air component of our system, is able to perform tasks of AI-supported computing. The exemplary prototype of this system was evaluated in terms of the ability to work with fast-response sensors, the ability to work with high temporal and high spatial resolutions, video information in poor visibility conditions and AI-readiness. Results show that prototypes based on the proposed framework are able to meet the challenges of monitoring systems in smart cities and industrial areas.