Definitions

An application that can be used to monitor the status of the UAV flock on a map and/or send commands to individual UAVs or groups of UAVs. A Flockwave client may be implemented as a standalone desktop application, a web application running in a desktop or mobile browser, a native mobile application (typically on Android or iOS) or even as a command-line application. Flockwave clients talk to a Flockwave server that is responsible for relaying commands and status information between the drones in the flock and the clients.

A headless server application that can accept connections from Flockwave clients and maintains one or several additional connections to the UAVs and other data sources (for instance, RTK correction data providers, drone docking stations, weather stations and so on).

In the context of a Flockwave server, an object is an entity whose state is tracked by the server. Examples include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), beacons on the ground or in the air, weather stations, control towers and ground stations, drone docking stations and so on. Each object consists of a set of devices and channels that are organised in a tree-like structure. See Objects, devices and channels for more information.

Unmanned aerial vehicle; typically a quad-, hexa- or octocopter that is equipped with the necessary onboard computer, software and communication equipment that enables it to participate in a UAV flock.

A typically immobile ground object that is not capable of moving on its own but can broadcast its position to UAVs and to the server.

A type of ground object that allows a drone to land and recharge itself in an autonomous manner.

A hardware component, an external peripheral or a virtual software component attached to an UAV or other object that provides real-time measurement data via a set of channels. For instance, a UAV may have a device named battery that provides the voltage of the battery of the UAV via a single numeric channel named voltage. A drone docking station may have devices representing the individual docking pads; others may use these devices to query whether the docking pads are occupied. See Objects, devices and channels for more information.