Autonomous drones are emerging as a powerful new breed of mobile sensing platform. Small embedded computers that move almost unconstrained while carrying rich sensor payloads, such as cameras and microphones, bring sensing where no other technology can reach. Notwithstanding the recent advancements, the current use of drone technology is often limited to manual control of individual devices by skilled individuals. The gap between this and large-scale autonomous operation remains significant. The challenges span diverse disciplines, while existing regulations are often not fully cognisant of the technology and may become a hampering factor. In this talk, we survey the research efforts we recently carried out to overcome some of these challenges. Our work includes programming systems, software verification, and automatic control. We deployed many of these solutions in a range of real-world applications, including aerial photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction, which further contributed to our understanding of  technical and practical issues. We then conclude by pointing out the several open problems still existing in this field.

Luca Mottola is an associate professor at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and a senior researcher at SICS Swedish ICT. He completed his Ph.D. at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2008. His research interests focus on modern networked embedded systems. Out of his research, he obtained the Google Faculty Award, was listed amongst Postscapes "Internet of Things Top 100 Thinkers”, and received the ERCIM Cor Baayen Award, the MIT TR Italia Young Innovator Award, the Best Paper Award at ACM MOBISYS 2016, the Best Paper Award at ACM/IEEE IPSN 2011 and 2009, and the EWSN/CONET European Best Ph.D. Thesis Award. Luca was PC co-chair for IEEE DCOSS 2015 . He's now serving as PC co-chair for ACM EWSN 2017 and will be serving as PC co-chair for ACM SENSYS 2017. He also recently joined the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.