IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2023 - 61

Figure 3. Proposed system overview with the three main parts and their components.
system would be the best fit for our case. However,
there is another reasonwhywe selected external illumination.
One of the emerging areas for this type of
application is drones' involvement in providing various
cues to humans in an efficient manner, thus
enhancing general situational awareness. Drones are
flexible to deploy and can fly very close to human
targets, which can assist with the dissemination of
necessary news updates indifficult circumstances.
In selecting which off-the-shelf drone to implement
in our framework, we considered several factors:
the battery capacity of the drone, the body
type (whether or not it landed on skids), and payload
capacity. We eliminated drones that did not
have a landing skid, as mounting attached systems
on top of the drone would have affected the stability
during flight. Per these requirements, we elected
to use a DJI Phantom3 drone in our research.
Attached System This part of the system
encompasses the direct modifications we have
made on the drone itself and represents the IoT
applications of our system. This unit is designed
to be configurable, allowing for different modules
to be put in or removed depending on
requirements. The application-oriented unit is to
be accessed through the ground station only via
a separate communication module.
Ground Station Deployment and operation of
drones require the utilization of a set of groundJanuary/February
2023
based hardware, software, and technologies,
including IoT, cloud computing, fog computing,
and blockchain. The application-oriented unit
will be directly controlled by the ground station
according to IoT gateways. cloud-fog platforms
are a series of nodes that receive data from IoT
devices in real time and provide localized services
to these applications. At the same time, all
the services and communications regarding the
flight would be deployed via blockchain.
System Architecture
We have framed the discussion of our system
into four broad categories: external controller
selection, power supply, mechanical modification,
and the IoT framework.
External Controller Selection A Raspberry
Pi computer is used as the external controller in
this project, which is widely used by computer and
electronic hobbyists, due to its adoption of HDMI
and USB devices. This external controller allows for
many types of applications to be undertaken. For
this project, we chose the customized illumination
systemas the primaryapplication for the controller.
As described previously, drones are increasingly
used in providing cues to increase situational
awareness. It is widely recognized that
humans maintain awareness of many aspects of
their environment through both selective attention
of some features and peripheral awareness
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