DOI: 10.2174/0126662558322348241119080528 ISSN: 2666-2558

A Survey on the Communication of UAVs with Charging and Control Stations

Aikaterini Chalkiadaki, Athanasios Milidonis, Christos Mourgelas, Ioannis Voyiatzis

Abstract:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have a history of over a century of deployment, but in recent decades, they have progressed at a staggering rate. Nowadays, UAVs are used by a large number of civil and military applications. The communication functionality of a UAV with external systems for control and charging is strongly connected with evolving technologies and services. This leads to an increased number of alternatives when designing UAV communications. This review presents the information needed for choosing an efficient communication system between UAVs and two important elements, the Ground Control Station (GCS) and the Charging Station (CS). GCS is responsible for monitoring and controlling the UAV’s units, while CS is used for the formal charging of the UAV. This study aimed at collecting, classifying, and evaluating all of the necessary information in order to obtain the final decision about the kind of communication that is most efficient for a target UAV application. The features of the telemetry open-source protocols are presented for the UAV-GCS communication and evaluated according to the needs of the most significant application domains. Communication between UAVs and CSs is classified depending on the existence of an intermediate server and analyzed considering telemetry protocols and application domains. Communication algorithms are evaluated in terms of time and energy efficiency. Lastly, for the most significant application domains, the most suitable algorithms are matched.

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