The giant honeybee Apis dorsata often forms dense colony aggregations which can include up to 200 often closely related nests in the same location, setting the stage for inbred matings. Yet, like in all other Apis species, A. dorsata queens mate in mid-air on lek like drone congregation areas (DCAs) where large numbers of males gather in flight. We here report how the drone composition of A. do...

This paper proposes a multidrone approach for autonomous cinematography planning. The use of drones for aerial cinematography is becoming a trend. Therefore, the aerial cinematography opens a new field of application for autonomous platforms that need to develop intelligent capabilities. This becomes even more challenging if a team of multiple drones are considered for cooperation. This paper i...

This paper focuses on services and applications provided to mobile users using airborne computing infrastructure. We present concepts such as drones-as-a-service and flyin,fly-out infrastructure, and note data management and system design issues that arise in these scenarios. Issues of Big Data arising from such applications, optimising the configuration of airborne and ground infrastructure to...

The development of the seminal vesicles in drone honeybee, Apis cerana indica has been investigated by using light and electron microscopy and biochemical estimation. The seminal vesicles were small, globular, paired secretory bodies fully-developed in the newly emerged adult drones. The wall was mainly composed of outer thick muscle layer and inner thin epithelial layer with tall columnar cell...

Small drones are being utilized in monitoring, delivery of goods, public safety, and disaster management among other civil applications. Due to their sizes, capabilities, payload limitations, and limited flight time, it is not far-fetched to expect multiple networked and coordinated drones incorporated into the air traffic. In this paper, we describe a high-level architecture for the design of ...

Male honey bees fly and gather at Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs), where drones and queens mate in flight. DCAs occur in places with presumably characteristic features. Using previously described landscape characteristics and observations on flight direction of drones in nearby apiaries, 36 candidate locations were chosen across the main island of Puerto Rico. At these locations, the presence o...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have a great potential to support search tasks in unstructured environments. Small, lightweight, low speed and agile UAVs, such as multirotors platforms can incorporate many kinds of sensors that are suitable for detecting object of interests in cluttered outdoor areas. However, due to their limited endurance, moderate computing power, and imperfect sensing, mini...

EPFL’s Information Processing Group (IPG) and Laboratory for Intelligent Systems (LIS), in conjunction with SenseFly (a LIS spin-off) recently started a project aimed at developing a testbed to experiment with self-organized wireless networks carried by autonomous unmanned aircrafts. The idea is to use drones developed by SenseFly to carry the infrastructure of a self-organized WiFi network for...

Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) such as quadrocopters have gained great popularity over the last years, both as a research platform and in various application fields. However, some complex application scenarios call for the formation of swarms consisting of multiple drones. In this paper a platform for the creation of such swarms is presented. It is based on commercially available quadroc...

Quadrotor drones equipped with high quality cameras have rapidely raised as novel, cheap and stable devices for filmmakers. While professional drone pilots can create aesthetically pleasing videos in short time, the smooth – and cinematographic – control of a camera drone remains challenging for most users, despite recent tools that either automate part of the process or enable the manual desig...