Abstract
These days, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Drones are increasingly used for everyday tasks. They dispose of both hardware and software capabilities that allow them to be used in various application domains. Current examples of using drones include flying drones for hobbies, video streaming for sport events, carrying supplies and deliver them to a specific spot, human tracking many others.Emergency responders are called every day for time-critical tasks and sometimes in hard to reach spots. UAVs are already used by emergency responders to support them in various tasks of their work. However, drone uses are typically limited to a single drone managed remotely by a human. University of Notre Dame is currently working on a project that aims to increase the use of drones in emergency missions. They envision using a cohort of drones acting semi- autonomously in order to support emergency responders. This however addresses a lot of safety concerns as well as many traditional software challenges.
This thesis has been written based on a four months internship at Notre Dame. During this time, the author of this thesis has worked on two main approaches to quickly eliciting and modeling requirements as well as configuring drones to achieve a particular mission. The first approach aims to configure a drone-based response system using verbal descriptions of missions while the second one comes with a configurator tool for a user to select an existing mission type or create a custom mission.
Work done in Notre Dame includes requirements engineering, programming, visualization tool use as well as academic research.
| Date of Award | 2020 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Patrick Heymans (Supervisor) |