An open platform for efficient drone-to-sensor wireless ranging and data harvesting

Drones deployed in combination with wireless sensors can unlock a host of prospective applications in environments that lack infrastructure communications networks and where access may be impossible for human operators. Community building efforts to engage with this opportunity are hampered by a lack of platform support and an evolving understanding of the performance of known wireless communications systems in dynamic outdoor environments, particularly under mobility. This paper proposes and evaluates a new combination of ultra-wide band and wake-up radio technologies. These enable high precision landing and support energy efficient operation. We describe in detail the design and implementation of an open platform making use of the combination of these radios to improve upon ranging, bandwidth and energy efficiency problems that affect drone-wireless sensor systems. Our evaluation shows how established ideas including low power listening and receiver-initiated data transfer compare with using a wake-up radio. We show that the energy efficiency of the localization-acquisition cycle can be improved by up to 62% with respect to a duty cycle approach. Our experimental evaluation also shows two orders of magnitude improvements in power consumption, from 190 mu W to 2 mu W, in non-ranging quiescent states on the sensor side.