Fully autonomous aerial systems (FAAS) fly complex missions guided wholly by software. If users choose software, compute hardware and aircraft well, FAAS can complete missions faster and safer than unmanned aerial systems piloted by humans. On the other hand, poorly managed edge resources slow down missions, waste energy and inflate costs. This paper presents a model-driven approach to manage FAAS. We fly real FAAS missions, profile compute and aircraft resource usage and model expected demands. Naive profiling approaches use traces from previous flights to infer resource usage. However, edge resources can affect where FAAS fly and which data they sense. Usage profiles can diverge greatly across edge management policies. Instead of using traces, we characterize whole flight areas to accurately model resource usage for any flight path. We combine expected resource demands to model mission throughput, i.e., missions completed per fully charged battery. We validated our model by creating FAAS, measuring mission throughput across many system settings. Our FAAS benchmarks, released through our open source FAAS suite SoftwarePilot, execute realistic missions: autonomous photography, search and rescue, and agricultural scouting using well-known software. Our model predicted throughput with 4% error across mission, software and hardware settings. Competing approaches yielded 10-24% error. We used our SoftwarePilot benchmarks to study (1) GPU acceleration, scale up, and scale out, (2) onboard, edge and cloud computing, (3) energy and monetary budgets, and (4) software driven GPU management. We found that model-driven management can boost mission throughput by 10X and reduce costs by 87%.

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Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are increasingly used in precision agriculture to collect crop health related data. UAS can capture data more often and more cost-effectively than sending human scouts into the field. However, in large crop fields, flight time, and hence data collection, is limited by battery life. In a conventional UAS approach, human operators are required to exchange depleted batteries many times, which can be costly and time consuming. In this study, we developed a novel, fully autonomous aerial scouting approach that preserves battery life by sampling sections of a field for sensing and predicting crop health for the whole field. Our approach uses reinforcement learning (RL) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) to accurately and autonomously sample the field. To develop and test the approach, we ran flight simulations on an aerial image dataset collected from an 80-acre corn field. The excess green vegetation Index was used as a proxy for crop health condition. Compared to the conventional UAS scouting approach, the proposed scouting approach sampled 40% of the field, predicted crop health with 89.8% accuracy, reduced labor cost by 4.8× and increased agricultural profits by 1.36×.

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