How can drones play an essential role for smart cities safety?
As smart cities are emerging, connectivity needs are increasing dramatically in various scenarios of citizens everyday lives. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), largely known as drones, are expected to play a key role in smart cities environment, providing services for traffic management, public safety, situation awareness and connectivity during large crowd events.
EURECOM’s professor Adlen Ksentini, expert in mobile and wireless networks, explains the potential role of drones within smart cities. Currently, EURECOM is a key partner of the European project 5G!Drones, demonstrating that 5G is crucial in supporting challenging use cases that could put pressure on network resources, such as low-latency and reliable communication, massive number of connections and high bandwidth requirements, simultaneously.
Q. Could you describe the context of drones use within smart cities?
AK: In the context of smart cities, drones could be used for infrastructure surveillance, public safety and even city resources optimisation management like waste collection, with the help of IoT devices. For example, monitoring the evolution of public building construction is essential for public safety. Drones are equipped with 3D cameras, that could create a 3D map of the building and the surrounding area, in order to identify potential issues. These drones are typically connected to a mobile network, operating in areas where WiFi can not cover. The 3D cameras on drones send high data rate stream, which requires good connectivity provided by 5G. Moreover, the necessary computations for the video reconstruction from data streamed by drones, can be treated locally at the edge of the network of the city, without the need of distant centralised computing solutions.
Another example is to use drones for monitoring the security of infrastructures, by carrying out regular surveillance patrols by drones. This use case is being tested in the context of the 5G!Drones project at the Campus SophiaTech in Sophia Antipolis France. All data are sent to the edge of the network, where they are treated with Machine Learning techniques, gaining enormously in latency.
Finally, drones could be placed at the entrance of stadiums, collecting video streaming and sending the collected data to a local server at the edge of the network. This local server would have facial detection algorithms implemented, in order to ensure safety in the sports event. For example, this scenario could address the issue of violence in stadiums by monitoring the crowd flow. Drones could be placed in different positions and can move in order to assist police forces. It is important to note that these data, which are privacy sensitive, would be treated locally at the edge of the network, without the need of central distant servers, addressing privacy protection issues.
Q. What about EURECOM’s role and who would be the major stakeholders for drone deployment is smart cities?
AK: EURECOM is contributing a 5G connectivity testing platform, based on OpenAirInterface (OAI), to verify and test that vertical markets are ready to propose their UAV solutions. Our research focuses on radio access networks (RAN), multi-access edge computing (MEC) and network virtualisation (NFV). We are working on a large range of network use cases, related to orchestration and management of virtual resources using Machine Learning, and Radio Access Networks in terms of virtualisation.
For the smart cities related use cases, we collaborate with the drone operators and owners. They include the video equipment, as well as they the software to make the drone fly automatically. Network operators would provide the connectivity and municipalities would contribute with the infrastructure in terms of hardware and possibly with 5G private networks for specific use cases in smart cities. Finally, vertical markets would use drones for their respective use cases of interest.
Q. What are the challenges for the future regarding drones deployment in actual cities?
AK: It has been 2 years since the beginning of the project 5G!Drones and we are now ready and capable to provide a robust 5G connectivity, to support services related to smart cities safety. We have also already developed the necessary algorithms to be able to host these solutions at the edge of the network. As a next step, drone deployment is currently taking place and the EU Commission is starting to create rules for regulating drone fly, much similar to aerial planification management. Hence, in the next decade drones will be part of our lives. Many verticals are now thinking about using drones as well, e.g. Amazon is considering to transport packages from one place to another, to avoid using trucks. There is also a potential use case to test, concerning people at remote locations needing drug delivery with drones in case of emergency.
Moreover, drones could be essential for mission-critical applications like natural disasters and rescuing people that are found in out-of-reach areas. We are currently working on a project to achieve video stream transmission from drones directly to virtual reality glasses, allowing critical-mission leaders to monitor situation more efficiently.
Drones are still somehow controversial but the social perception is starting to change. Especially after the first lockdown, where drones were used to monitor crowd circulation making sure people respected physical distance measures. Technological prerequisites for UAV use cases in real cities are already achieved. Now, the next step is for society to accept drones and authorities to create a safe regulatory framework for drones to operate.
by Dora Matzakou for EURECOM
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