AeroDaaS: Towards an Application Programming Framework for Drones-as-a-Service

Abstract

The increasing adoption of UAVs with advanced sensors and GPU-accelerated edge computing has enabled real-time AI-driven applications in fields such as precision agriculture, wildfire monitoring, and environmental conservation. However, integrating deep learning on UAVs remains challenging due to platform heterogeneity, real-time constraints, and the need for seamless cloud-edge coordination. To address these challenges, we introduce AeroDaaS, a service-oriented framework that abstracts UAV-based sensing complexities and provides a Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) model for intelligent decision-making. AeroDaaS offers modular service primitives for on-demand UAV sensing, navigation, and analytics as composable microservices, ensuring cross-platform compatibility and scalability across heterogeneous UAV and edge-cloud infrastructures. We implement and evaluate a preliminary version of AeroDaaS for two real-world DaaS applications. We require <=40 lines of code for the applications and see minimal platform overhead of <=20 ms per frame and <=0.5 GB memory usage on Orin Nano. These early results are promising for AeroDaaS as an efficient, flexible and scalable UAV programming framework for autonomous aerial analytics.

arXiv comment27 pages, To Appear as a Short Paper at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)