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.