MAVLink UAV Hangar Communication Based on a Cloud Architecture

Swimming accidents in both standing and open waters result in numerous rescue missions every year. When rescuing a drowning person, every second counts. Autonomous mission flights that are carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can make a valuable contribution in such cases by locating the drowning victim from the air and transmitting the geo-coordinates to the rescue team which is on site. To do this, the UAV is to be stationed in the swimming area, for which it is placed in an intelligent UAV hangar with integrated postflight control routines. In order for the UAV to be integrated into the defined rescue chain, the decentralized UAV hangar must be able to communicate with the central rescue control center as well as to carry out various internal processes and evaluations for various preflight and postflight controls. In this paper, we present a water rescue approach involving a UAV hangar applied on a water rescue deployment scenario and propose a cloud-based architecture for the UAV hangar software to conduct preflight and postflight checks. Furthermore, a communication structure for enabling the UAV hangar to transmit to and receive data from the rescue control center using a MAVLink interface and a specific customized dialect is propounded within this work.