A Distributed Uav Analytics Framework for Daobased Swarm Systems

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in inspection and monitoring missions, yet onboard computation and communication impose significant energy burdens that limit flight time and operational scope. In this work, we introduce a novel, blockchain-enabled framework-grounded in the Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) paradigm-for orchestrating distributed analytics across a swarm of UAVs. Leveraging the OASEES project's smart-contract architecture, each drone embeds a Metrics Module for real-time power monitoring, a Behavioral Module for adaptive control, and a Blockchain Agent that autonomously proposes, votes on, and executes collective decisions. Three concurrent threads-Proposal Trigger, Voting, and Action Execution-enable fully decentralized governance of swarm behavior: from detecting critical energy thresholds and formulating swarm-wide conservation maneuvers, to executing approved strategies across all members. We validate our framework in a UAV-based infrastructure inspection scenario, employing a YOLOv5 object-detection pipeline to classify four corrosion classes on a telecommunications mast under three video-capture modalities (short-distance, long-distance, and horizontally concatenated streams). Across all configurations, our system achieves near-perfect precision, recall, and mean Average Precision (mAP50-95 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\approx 0.995$</tex>), demonstrating both the efficacy of distributed workload inference and the feasibility of treating a single drone as a multi-feed processor. These results underscore the potential of DAO-driven UAV swarms for energy-aware, resilient aerial analytics, and pave the way for fully decentralized 5G/6G-enabled airborne networks.

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Published
2025-09-29
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/srds69199.2025.00057
Primary Topic
UAV Applications and Optimization
Type
article
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article

A Distributed Uav Analytics Framework for Daobased Swarm Systems

Abhinaba Chakraborty, Ioannis Vasalos, Achileas Economopoulos, Georgios Alexandridis et al.
UAV Applications and Optimization
article

A Distributed Uav Analytics Framework for Daobased Swarm Systems

Abhinaba Chakraborty, Ioannis Vasalos, Achileas Economopoulos, Georgios Alexandridis, Averkios Vasalos, George Xilouris, Andreas Oikonomakis, Michail-Alexandros Kourtis, Panagiotis Trakadas
article en

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in inspection and monitoring missions, yet onboard computation and communication impose significant energy burdens that limit flight time and operational scope. In this work, we introduce a novel, blockchain-enabled framework-grounded in the Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) paradigm-for orchestrating distributed analytics across a swarm of UAVs. Leveraging the OASEES project's smart-contract architecture, each drone embeds a Metrics Module for real-time power monitoring, a Behavioral Module for adaptive control, and a Blockchain Agent that autonomously proposes, votes on, and executes collective decisions. Three concurrent threads-Proposal Trigger, Voting, and Action Execution-enable fully decentralized governance of swarm behavior: from detecting critical energy thresholds and formulating swarm-wide conservation maneuvers, to executing approved strategies across all members. We validate our framework in a UAV-based infrastructure inspection scenario, employing a YOLOv5 object-detection pipeline to classify four corrosion classes on a telecommunications mast under three video-capture modalities (short-distance, long-distance, and horizontally concatenated streams). Across all configurations, our system achieves near-perfect precision, recall, and mean Average Precision (mAP50-95 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\approx 0.995$</tex>), demonstrating both the efficacy of distributed workload inference and the feasibility of treating a single drone as a multi-feed processor. These results underscore the potential of DAO-driven UAV swarms for energy-aware, resilient aerial analytics, and pave the way for fully decentralized 5G/6G-enabled airborne networks.

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (GR), National Centre of Scientific Research "Demokritos" (GR), Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (Greece) (GR), Ghent University Hospital (BE), Ghent University (BE), Frontier Science Foundation-Hellas (GR), Institute of Informatics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SK)
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Openalex Percentile: Top 15%
UAV Applications and Optimization
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