IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2023 - 60

Increasing Drone Safety Through Illumination
Figure 2. Some safety issues facing consumer drones. Left to right: trespassing and illegal surveillance, attacks on IoD,
communication between flying agents, drones conspicuousness in the sky.
airports govern the movement of airplanes in their
respective airspaces, Gharibi et al. proposed zone
service providers to govern dronemovement. However,
there are security issues with the IoT frameworks
themselves, such as spoofing and jamming.17
In order to combat security-related issues in IoT,
blockchain technologies18 and elliptic curve cryptography19
have been suggested to strengthen the
networks that are used to communicate with the
different components of IoT frameworks.
The other major safety issue facing drones is
ensuring they are conspicuous to their surroundings
during operation. One common solution
deployed in other areas of aviation is the
use of illumination. Techniques using different
colors and patterns have been mainstays in communicating
the direction of movement of planes
and the layout of the runway. Illumination is
especially important in nighttime operations
when the only natural source of light is moonlight.
Conspicuousness during flight is not only
important for ensuring the safety of humans but
to ensuring the success of future drone operations
themselves, both piloted and autonomous.
Apart from alerting other agents to a drone's
whereabouts, illumination in drones would be
vital as many drones use stereovision for obstacle
avoidance. Without appropriate visual cues,
the drone would essentially be flying " blind. "
Although quite prevalent in general aviation,
this aspect of illumination is largely absent in drone
regulations and related scientific endeavors. This
study will introduce an illumination system that
addresses these needs. Taking inspiration from
studies that have used IoT frameworks to solve
security problems for drones, our illumination system
is also based upon an IoT platform. To ensure
60
the security of our illumination system, we also utilize
blockchain technology for secure communication.
We envision this platform to be used as a
safety feature to ensure drones can operate in any
ambient lighting conditions. In addition, with our
system,wehope to inspire further researchand regulations
development on illumination for drone
operations.
Our manuscript is structured as follows: We
first give an overview of our proposed IoT framework
and its specific components. Then, we
present the results of our two validation experiments:
the power consumption test in which we
investigate how much power our system uses in
different circumstances, and the human-in-theloop
assessment, in which we test our system in
the field while investigating the effect of distance
and illumination color on the distance perception
of humans. Our manuscript ends with a discussion
on the limitations of our framework and
future research we plan to pursue.
SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
System Overview
We have proposed a system which is comprised
of three main parts. The overview of our
proposed system is depicted in Figure 3.
Original Drone In order to address the safety
issue of drone visibility, we focused onmaking the
drones conspicuous. Specifically, we focused on
illumination, as it has precedence in the aviation
industry. We have elaborated on how we came to
select illumination as the primary medium later in
the manuscript. After surveying illumination systems,20
we decided that an external illumination
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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2023

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