Development of an Internet of Things System Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for the Application of Smart Security from Sky

Recently, due to its ubiquitous usability, the multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is playing an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city, which is an urban development vision to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) and IoT technology in a secure fashion to manage a city's assets. However, there are many challenges that are needed to overcome before deploying UAVs. These challenges comprise not only technical issues, but also regulation issues. In this paper, a UAV-based architecture of value-added IoT services from the sky will be introduced. In order to develop the UAV-based value-added IoT service from the sky, a multirotor UAV was setup with the capability of wireless communication technologies. The selected wireless technologies are cellular 4G long term evolution (LTE) and Wi-Fi. A cloud platform, named DRONE Hatch, was adopted. The core technology of the proposed architecture is that the UAV mission can be executed totally from DRONE Hatch without the help of any pilot using a remote controller. The test results of the integrated platform show that it is viable to develop the value-added IoT service from the sky.