Abstract:
Drones are now being widely used in different civilian applications, such as delivering shipments to consumers, as proposed by Amazon, and providing internet access to users, as offered by Facebook and Google. Drones can also contribute in emergencies by helping to find victims in places that are not reachable by rescuers, as well as assisting emergency centers to better manage a reported emergency. However, drones have a short flying time due to limited battery life. Therefore, a reliable strategy that minimizes energy consumption and uses collaborative working is required in order to increase drones' ability to operate for longer periods in emergency situations. This paper presents an adaptive task scheduler that allows tasks to be shared/transferred among the drones in a cloud of drones, in order to extend the operational time, achieve faster task execution and, at the same time, reduce the usage of each drone's resources. The ultimate result is an extension of battery life that leads to longer flying and service time for individual drones.
