Designing UAV Surveillance Frameworks for Smart City and Extensive Ocean with Differential Perspectives

In this article, we design differential frameworks for monitoring smart city and extensive ocean by multiple heterogeneous smart UAVs. Since the requirements and fundamental environments between smart city and extensive ocean are quite different, we consider two differential strategies. For smart city, we introduce a tight plane-based framework that utilizes the existing public transportation including public buses, city trains, and their routes to provide time-sensitive surveillance. For extensive ocean, we develop a loose hierarchical-based framework. To support seamless surveillance over extensive ocean, we use three types of UAVs, which allows replenishment among heterogeneous UAVs at different layers through airborne docking. Moreover, the research challenges and open issues related to the differentiated infrastructures are presented.