arXiv subjects

Giorgos Polychronis

Publications and source records attributed to Giorgos Polychronis.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Using Machine Learning to Take Stay-or-Go Decisions in Data-driven Drone Missions

Drones are becoming indispensable in many application domains. In data-driven missions, besides sensing, the drone must process the collected data at runtime to decide whether additional action must be taken on the spot, before moving to the next point of interest. If processing does not reveal an event or situation that requires such an action, the drone has waited in vain instead of moving to the next point. If, however, the drone starts moving to the next point and it turns out that a follow-up action is needed at the previous point, it must spend time to fly-back. To take this decision, we propose different machine-learning methods based on branch prediction and reinforcement learning. We evaluate these methods for a wide range of scenarios where the probability of event occurrence changes with time. Our results show that the proposed methods consistently outperform the regression-based method proposed in the literature and can significantly improve the worst-case mission time by up to 4.1x. Also, the achieved median mission time is very close, merely up to 2.7% higher, to that of a method with perfect knowledge of the current underlying event probability at each point of interest.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Should I Stay or Should I Go: A Learning Approach for Drone-based Sensing Applications

Multicopter drones are becoming a key platform in several application domains, enabling precise on-the-spot sensing and/or actuation. We focus on the case where the drone must process the sensor data in order to decide, depending on the outcome, whether it needs to perform some additional action, e.g., more accurate sensing or some form of actuation. On the one hand, waiting for the computation to complete may waste time, if it turns out that no further action is needed. On the other hand, if the drone starts moving toward the next point of interest before the computation ends, it may need to return back to the previous point, if some action needs to be taken. In this paper, we propose a learning approach that enables the drone to take informed decisions about whether to wait for the result of the computation (or not), based on past experience gathered from previous missions. Through an extensive evaluation, we show that the proposed approach, when properly configured, outperforms several static policies, up to 25.8%, over a wide variety of different scenarios where the probability of some action being required at a given point of interest remains stable as well as for scenarios where this probability varies in time.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Flexible Computation Offloading at the Edge for Autonomous Drones with Uncertain Flight Times

An ever increasing number of applications can employ aerial unmanned vehicles, or so-called drones, to perform different sensing and possibly also actuation tasks from the air. In some cases, the data that is captured at a given point has to be processed before moving to the next one. Drones can exploit nearby edge servers to offload the computation instead of performing it locally. However, doing this in a naive way can be suboptimal if servers have limited computing resources and drones have limited energy resources. In this paper, we propose a protocol and resource reservation scheme for each drone and edge server to decide, in a dynamic and fully decentralized way, whether to offload the computation and respectively whether to accept such an offloading requests, with the objective to evenly reduce the drones' mission times. We evaluate our approach through extensive simulation experiments, showing that it can significantly reduce the mission times compared to a no-offloading scenario by up to 26.2%, while outperforming an offloading schedule that has been computed offline by up to 7.4% as well as a purely opportunistic approach by up to 23.9%.

cs.RO↗