The OODA Loop of Cloudlet-Based Autonomous Drones
Mihir Bala, Aditya Chanana, Xiangliang Chen, Qifei Dong, Thomas Eiszler, Jingao Xu, Padmanabhan S. Pillai, Mahadev Satyanarayanan · 2024
We present a benchmark-driven experimental study of autonomous drone agility relative to edge offload pipeline attributes. This pipeline includes a monocular gimbal-actuated on-drone camera, hardware RTSP video encoding, 4G LTE wireless network transmission, and computer vision processing on a ground-based GPU-equipped cloudlet. Our parameterized and reproducible agility benchmarks stress the OODA (“Observe, Orient, Decide, Act”) loop of the drone on obstacle avoidance and object tracking tasks. We characterize the latency and throughput of components of this OODA loop through software profiling, and identify opportunities for optimization.