SkySAIL: a Flexible Software-Defined Radio Enabled Micro Aerial Vehicle

Nowadays, Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) find applications in different areas, such as search and rescue, photography, inspection, surveillance, etc. The MAVs, with weight up to several kilograms, are promising candidates for rescue operations during disasters such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. Equipping those with radio interfaces will allow to re-establish radio communication in disaster scenario, or be used for localization of survived victims. However, equipping MAV with helpful devices is limited by payload and battery capacitance. In this work, we present a novel flexible Software-defined radio enabled micro AerIal vehicLe (SkySAIL), as a powerful platform to support different RF sensing applications. The SkySAIL is a multifunctional multi-rotor MAV equipped with a frequency agile multichannel software-defined radio (SDR). In contrast to the state-of-the-art, our solution can flexibly support multiple communication technologies depending on application scenario, remaining a very effective (in terms of energy consumption and localization accuracy), robust and mobile approach. Results indicate that SkySAIL autonomously localizes GSM mobile stations (MSs) more accurately than state-of-the-art approaches with a mean relative localization error of 13% (3.22 m in absolute measures).