Unmanned aerial vehicles continue to penetrate many different markets segments at a very high speed. When manually flown platforms dominated the use cases in the past, rapid advances in mechanical, algorithmic, and also compute power aspects heavily fostered the autonomy of such vehicles. With the advent of 5G communication, we are on the verge of yet another quantum leap allowing use cases for autonomous aerial vehicles in larger networks and coordinated swarms. In this talk we will highlight the current state of technology for networked autonomous aerial vehicles based on the ongoing efforts at the Universitaet Klagenfurt on networked autonomous drones navigating in GNSS challenged environments and with advanced connectivity and synchronization capabilities for improved data streaming. We will also shed light on current challenges and opportunities in this field to trigger the discussion on future aspects for networked autonomous aerial vehicles.

Authors: Christian Bettstetter, Herman Hellwagner, Bernhard Rinner, Stephan Weiss