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Now that drones have evolved from bulky platforms to agile devices, a challenge is to combine multiple drones into an integrated autonomous system, offering functionality that individual drones cannot achieve. Such multidrone systems require connectivity, communication, and coordination. We discuss these building blocks along with case studies and lessons learned.

Smart cameras perform on-board image analysis, adapt their algorithms to changes in their environment, and collaborate with other networked cameras to analyze the dynamic behavior of objects. A proposed computational framework adopts the concepts of self-awareness and self-expression to more efficiently manage the complex tradeoffs among performance, flexibility, resources, and reliability. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/NKe31_OKLz4 is a video demonstrating CamSim, a smart camera simulation tool, enables users to test self-adaptive and self-organizing smart-camera techniques without deploying a smart-camera network.

By bringing together advances in computer vision, embedded computing, image sensors, and networks, researchers are working toward more automated analysis of large-scale camera networks' data.

Recent advances in computing, communication, and sensor technology are pushing the development of many new applications. This trend is especially evident in pervasive computing, sensor networks, and embedded systems. Smart cameras, one example of this innovation, are equipped with a high-performance onboard computing and communication infrastructure, combining video sensing, processing, and communications in a single embedded device. By providing access to many views through cooperation among individual cameras, networks of embedded cameras can potentially support more complex and challenging applications - including smart rooms, surveillance, tracking, and motion analysis - than a single camera. We designed our smart camera as a fully embedded system, focusing on power consumption, QoS management, and limited resources. The camera is a scalable, embedded, high-performance, multiprocessor platform consisting of a network processor and a variable number of digital signal processors (DSPs). Using the implemented software framework, our embedded cameras offer system-level services such as dynamic load distribution and task reconfiguration. In addition, we combined several smart cameras to form a distributed embedded surveillance system that supports cooperation and communication among cameras.