Speaker: Assistant Prof Luca Mottola,  Politecnico di Milano, and SICS
Title: Spatio-temporal Programming of Multiple Coordinating Aerial Drones
Time: Monday, Dec 16, 15.30
Place: Ångström, House 7, Floor 2, Signal and Systems  

Abstract: The talk will focus on our recent work around LiftOff: a 
programming system to develop applications using multiple coordinating 
aerial drones; for example, to monitor pollution at altitude. Building 
multi-drone systems is difficult, yet the benefits over single devices 
may be significant. LiftOff allows to program multiple drones collectively, 
by creating the illusion of a single computing device that occupies the 
physical space of interest. We achieve this by defining an abstract 
machine to collectively control the drones, and by giving variables in 
a programming language spatial and temporal semantics. A system of 
“futures" and “promises" we design allows concurrent executions while 
retaining the sequential semantics. To study the effectiveness of LiftOff, 
we considered three representative applications including a real deployment 
in Aquileia (Italy) for aerial mapping of an archaeological site. The 
results we will illustrate indicate that using multiple coordinating 
drones over single devices does provide significant advantages. Developers 
harvest these advantages as LiftOff facilitates programming multi-drone 
applications compared to existing approaches, at the price of a modest 
increase in resource consumption.

Bio: Luca Mottola is an assistant professor at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) 
and a senior researcher at SICS Swedish ICT. Previously, he was a research 
scholar at the University of Southern California (USA). He completed his 
Ph.D. at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2008, after obtaining a M.Sc. in 
Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago (USA) and a 
M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy). His 
research interests focus on on Cyberphysical Systems. Out of his research, 
he was listed amongst Postscapes "Internet of Things Top 100 Thinkers", 
and has received the ERCIM Cor Baayen Award; the MIT TR Italia Young 
Innovator Award; the EWSN/CONET European Best Ph.D. Thesis Award; the Best 
Paper Award at ACM/IEEE IPSN 2011; the Best Paper Award at ACM/IEEE 
IPSN 2009; and the Best Demo Award at ACM SenSys 2007.