Table
2: Specification of DJI Phantom Pro v2 drone.
Furthermore, each drone is equipped with a Raspberry Pi 4 that has its
own battery and is connected to sensors like a body thermometer, motion
detection, ID scanner, a loudspeaker, and also solar energy panel for
recharging the batteries while in mission.
Drones Network Architecture
The gathered data is initially processed at the drone level and then
shared with upper-level systems for further detailed processing and/or
database storing. In our approach, we assume to have three operational
levels or layers; drone, local clinic (or base station), and general
hospital levels, Figure 1 shows an overview of the proposed system
architecture, which makes it scalable in a hierarchical manner as shown
in Figure 2. The drone level is comprised of SDs and one LD. The SDs
collect COVID-19 test data then process it and send a case status
report, if the symptoms indicate that the case is infected, to the LD
which acts as a swarm sink node and is connected to the local clinic
level. At the local clinic level, a local clinic can run and manage
multiple scanning instances in nearby areas simultaneously by deploying
several drone swarms, and if any critical case is found then the general
hospital is called for help. Therefore, a local clinic acts as a sink
node for the drone swarms as it is connected to the general hospital.
The general hospital level is the highest level, where it has the best
available services for COVID-19 containment in town including specialist
doctors, medical equipment and supplies, and a general database for all
city residents. Also, it supervises local clinics’ operations and can
intervene to diagnose emergency cases reported by local clinics upon
their request.