Drones, in particular cheap polycopters, can serve as mobile sensor/actuator nodes in many civilian application domains, such as environmental sensing, traffic monitoring in cities, search & rescue operations and transportation/delivery of goods. For this reason, intensive research is done not only on improving the autonomy of drone systems but also on developing software systems that will support automated application-specific missions.
The workshop is structured in three parts. In the first part, we will briefly present the research activities of the Computer Systems Lab of UTH (https://csl.e-ce.uth.gr) in terms of software and algorithms to support the fully automated execution of missions with one or more drones, as well as for the testing of such missions in the lab. In the second part, we will make a tutorial, with active involvement of the participants, on how to write and test custom mission programs on top of openly available telemetry libraries and autopilot systems. Finally, in the third part, using such a software environment, participants will be given the opportunity to implement and test a specific mission that will be given as an assignment.

Spyros Lalis is a Professor at the ECE Department, University of Thessaly. He holds a Diploma in Informatics Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. His research interests include programming languages/environments, system software, distributed systems and ubiquitous computing systems. He has published more than 100 papers in international conferences and journals, and his work has been funded through competitive EU and national research projects.

Manos Koutsoubelias is a PostDoc researcher at the ECE Department, University of Thessaly. His research interests include distributed systems, wireless sensor networks and application support mechanisms for cyber-physical systems. Manos earned his PhD and MSc in computer engineering from the University of Thessaly.

Giorgos Polychronis is a PhD candidate at the ECE Department, University of Thessaly. He graduated and subsequently completed his postgraduate studies in the same department. His research interests include the design and implementation of algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems, autonomous unmanned vehicle systems and wireless sensor systems.