Authors:
Stefan Hristozov
1
and
Boris Shishkov
2
Affiliations:
1
Institute of Systems Engineering and Robotics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
;
2
Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
Keyword(s):
Usability, Drone Technology, Land Border Security.
Abstract:
Some years ago, it would have been amazing to see a drone flying and behaving ‘on its own’, not knowing
whether it is distantly navigated by a human or it is somehow autonomic. Currently we observe that: (i)
Youngsters can easily buy toy drones and navigate them distantly; (ii) Military drones realize sophisticated
operations in dangerous environments. This indicates for impressive advances in the technologies underlying
drone developments, and that is all about ICT – Information and Communication Technology: current ICT is
often embedded in services and/or devices. It is ICT that brings together hardware, software, and net-ware
features, to enable useful solutions in different domains, such as aviation. As it concerns particularly drones,
they represent complex devices comprising mechanical and ICT ‘components’. Current drones can be piloted
remotely. Further, being equipped with video cameras, they can provide fast access to images (and/or realtime
videos) from a range of locations
. Finally, advanced solar power supplies make it possible for drones to
stay up for a very long time. Hence, this all makes current drone technology societally relevant. At the same
time, many questions have not yet been answered (even though technology developed) – several of those
questions are: Is current drone technology indeed reliable if used in critical (rescue) operations? How is the
human navigating a drone responsible for what the drone would do? Who is responsible in the case of
autonomic drones? Are current software platforms running on drones powerful enough to cover all possible
situations that may pop up in the sky? To answer those and other related questions, it is necessary to ‘step in
the shoes’ of a particular application domain since those issues are domain-specific – an answer concerning
one domain is not necessarily valid for another domain. Hence, inspired by another paper in the current
proceedings, we focus on land border security. We therefore aim at studying the usability of drone technology,
with regard to the mentioned domain. For this reason, we firstly discuss drone technology in general and then
we analyze its usability in land border security. This analysis is a contribution of the current position paper
and inspiration for further research featuring the development of advanced context-aware drone platforms.
(More)