2.8) Frequently Asked Questions

This page will be updated with responses to frequently asked questions in the future. If you have questions that you could not find answers to in this user manual, please see the User Support page for different ways to contact the AERPAW team. 

1) How does the workflow look like for AERPAW's "Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)" experiments? 

If you are interested in BYOD experiments, our workflow includes the following process before we can approve to support your experiment over AERPAW.

2) Do the UAV and UGV in AERPAW have CPU and/or some lightweight GPU resources?  Basically, I’m interested in learning about the computing and storage capacity of UAV and UGV. Do they allow some local storage and customized computation? 

For AERPAW, the vehicles are treated as extensions/capabilities of our Portable Nodes (APRNs), which represent the on-board computing you are looking for.  No GPUs are supported as of December, 2021.  Some details of the APRN design are in Sections 1.3 and 1.4 of the AERPAW User Manual. Customized computation is not only possible, but almost essential; while there is some sample software pre-installed on the APRNs that allows some simple operations to be performed, for any meaningful research-specific experiment, the experimenter is expected to write the code.

3) Can the UAV, UGV, SDRs, and mobile phone communicate with each other using peer-to-peer? What communication protocols are supported, WiFi, 5G? 

Since the APRNs have SDRs, they can do anything you can code them to do.  Sample software is provided for a few software stacks - details of what and how-to-use in Section 4 of the User Manual.

4) What types of mobile phones are supported by the platform? 

As of end of Phase-1, none are provided by AERPAW; internally we know which models work with our Ericsson system and have a number of phones of such models, but since the Ericsson system is itself not available for public remote use as of end of Phase-1 (it will be part of our work during Phase-2 to make such use possible), there is no way we can let users use them.  For now, the SDR (portable and fixed-on-ground) nodes are the only ones available for experimenter use.  User Manual Section 1.2 shows the projected timeline of different equipment becoming available for experimenter use. It is also possible to incorporate custom devices into the testbed for supporting specific experiments, a BYOD model, but at this time our upcoming effort is so committed to further development and scaling that we probably will not be able to support BYOD efforts any time soon.

5) Can we connect the UAV, UGV, mobile phones to our own cloud, e.g. the cloud at our institution or AWS cloud? 

As of end of Phase-1, this is not possible.  Again, this is because AERPAW is fundamentally not a computing facility, but a physical facility, and our focus is on getting remote users experimental access to the physical resources, which consist of the airspace and the RF environment, by mediation of customs programmable devices to explore and interact with the same, namely UAVs/UGVs and SDR.  Our AFRNs and APRNs provide compute capability, and in future we will also be able to provide some "backend nodes" to represent a remote cloud (but they will not be very high capacity).  Connecting the physical facilities to remote compute clouds not under our control is something we don’t yet have a clear use case or model for.  Down the line, we would like to understand the utility and requirements for such a scenario, however it is not on our immediate roadmap for the coming year.

6) Can I use my unmanned aircraft system to perform experiments on the AERPAW platform?

Experiments that utilize a non-AERPAW UAS will be approved on a case-by-case basis.  The pilots, aircraft, and mission planning must conform to NC State Regulation 10.10.09 – Operations of Unmanned Aircraft Systems: https://oit.ncsu.edu/campus-it/rules-and-regulations/uas/.  Regulation 10.10.09 covers UAS pilot requirements, notification and approval (flight plans), UAS insurance, compliance, and oversight. Please contact Thomas Zajkowski (tjzajkow@ncsu.edu) and aerpaw-contact@ncsu.edu for more information.

7) We are working on a proposal to be submitted to the National Science Foundation. We are planning to use AERPAW if our project gets funded. Can we get a collaboration letter from AERPAW to attach to our proposal? 

The AERPAW operations team will be happy to support your project if it gets funded. We are actually required to support NSF-funded projects by default if they are supported under our general availability features and no separate collaboration letter is required based on the guidelines we received from the PAWR Project Office. 

If your proposal is not for NSF, or if there is substantial collaboration expected beyond what is supported by the general availability features of AERPAW, please contact the AERPAW team at aerpaw-contact@ncsu.edu with a detailed description that explains how you plan to use specific features of the platform and why they can not be supported under our general availability features specified under this user manual. We would expect to meet with you and understand your requirements,  and also expect a substantial description to be included within your proposal. We may also expect that you include a dedicated budget to support AERPAW platform operations outside of its general availability, especially if it involves UAV pilots and platform customization. 

To understand whether your proposed work may be supported or not under our general availability, we strongly recommend that you generate an account in our experiment web portal and execute experiments in our emulation environment. Our Phase-2 features and a new version of our experiment web portal are expected to be released by May 2023. You may find substantial information about existing and upcoming sample experiments under Section 4 of this user manual. 

8) I am a researcher that is employed by an institution outside of the United States. Am I eligible to access AERPAW's development and testbed environments?

AERPAW is a facility funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and one that is intended to serve the research needs of U.S. academia (especially those funded by NSF), and U.S. industry.  In the long term, AERPAW (and other PAWR platforms) are going to be pay-per-use, since we have to be self-sustaining.  In the initial period of NSF-funded development of the facility (which we are in currently), we have started to serve a limited number of experimenters; we are required to prioritize usage by NSF-funded U.S. academics, for whom usage is free during this initial period.

In general, we are not supporting a broad use of the platform by International (non-US) researchers, whether academia or industry, in our initial build-to-operate period, and do not expect to do so during our long-term sustainability period either. Having said that, in the spirit of being open academia, we aim to provide international researchers with provisional access to our canonical (“Program-it-Yourself”) model of usage (i.e., to experimentation using AERPAW's digital twin environment), for as much of the remaining part of the NSF-funded period.  This is AERPAW's primary model of supporting experimenters, and our online User Manual and sample experiment software provide full support for this model.  However, we have to make sure such international researchers understand that depending on the task load faced by the facility, we may at any time need to discontinue your access, and will certainly need to do so by project end, if not before.

Unless otherwise specified, AERPAW competitions (e.g., the AERPAW Find-a-Rover (AFAR) Challenge organized in 2023) are open by default for participation by users who are outside of the United States. Requirements and expectations in Section 2.1 of this user manual on account creation and authentication, and in Section 2.5 on acceptable use policy, still apply. Access however excludes users and entities who may be on U.S. restricted party lists, including but not limited to the U.S. Entity List released by the U.S. Department of Commerce. We will have to decline any and all platform access requests from such restricted entities.