Fundamental Concepts of Reactive Control for Autonomous Drones

Autonomous drones represent a new breed of mobile computing system. Compared to smartphones and connected cars that only opportunistically sense or communicate, drones allow motion control to become part of the application logic. The efficiency of their movements is largely dictated by the low-level control enabling their autonomous operation based on high-level inputs. Existing implementations of such low-level control operate in a time-triggered fashion. In contrast, we conceive a notion of reactive control that allows drones to execute the low-level control logic only upon recognizing the need to, based on the influence of the environment onto the drone operation.