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 AeroDaaS, a service-oriented framework that abstracts UAV-based sensing complexities and provides a Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) model for intelligent decision-making. AeroDaaS 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 implement and evaluate a preliminary version of AeroDaaS for two real-world DaaS applications. We require <=40 lines of code for the applications and see minimal platform overhead of <=20 ms per frame and <=0.5 GB memory usage on Orin Nano. These early results are promising for AeroDaaS as an efficient, flexible and scalable UAV programming framework for autonomous aerial analytics.
@article{arxiv.2504.03802,
title = {AeroDaaS: Towards an Application Programming Framework for Drones-as-a-Service},
author = {Suman Raj and Rajdeep Singh and Kautuk Astu and Yogesh Simmhan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.03802},
year = {2025}
}
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27 pages, To Appear as a Short Paper at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)