Towards a Drones-as-a-Service Platform for Application Programming

The increasing adoption of UAVs with advanced sensors and GPU-accelerated edge computing has enabled real-time AI-driven applications in fields such as precision agriculture, wildfire monitoring, and environmental conservation. However, integrating deep learning on UAVs remains challenging due to platform heterogeneity, real-time constraints, and the need for seamless cloud-edge coordination. To address these challenges, we introduce a service-oriented framework that abstracts UAV-based sensing complexities and provides a Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) model for intelligent decision-making. The framework offers modular service primitives for on-demand UAV sensing, navigation, and analytics as composable microservices, ensuring cross-platform compatibility and scalability across heterogeneous UAV and edge-cloud infrastructures. We evaluate our framework by implementing four real-world DaaS applications. Two are executed using its runtime on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and DJI Tello drones in real-world scenarios and the other two in simulation, with analytics running on edge accelerators and AWS cloud. We achieve a minimal service overhead of <=20 ms per frame and <=0.5 GB memory usage on Orin Nano. Additionally, it significantly reduces development effort, requiring as few as 40 lines of code while maintaining hardware agnosticism. These results establish our work as an efficient, flexible, and scalable UAV intelligence framework, unlocking new possibilities for autonomous aerial analytics.