Nowadays, Internet of things (IoT) and robotic systems are key drivers of technological innovation trends. Leveraging the advantages of both technologies, IoT‐aided robotic systems can disclose a disruptive potential of opportunities The present contribution provides an experimental analysis of an IoT‐aided robotic system for environmental monitoring. To this end, an experimental testbed has been developed. It is composed of: (i) an IoT device connected to (ii) an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which executes a patrolling mission within a specified area, where (iii) an IoT network has been deployed to sense environmental data. An extensive experimental campaign has been carried out to scavenge pros and cons of adopted technologies. The key results of the authors analysis show that: (i) the UAV does not incur any significant overhead due to onboard IoT equipment and (ii) the overall quality of service expressed in terms of network joining time, data retrieval delay and packet loss ratio satisfies the mission requirements. These results enable further development in larger‐scale environment.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is a networking architecture that stems from the interplay between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and wireless communication technologies. Networked drones can unleash disruptive scenarios in many application domains. At the same time, to really capitalize on their potential, accurate modeling techniques are required to seize the fine details that characterize the features and limitations of UAVs, wireless communications, and networking protocols. To this end, the present contribution proposes the IoD simulator (IoD-Sim), a comprehensive and versatile open source tool that addresses the many facets of the IoD. IoD-Sim is a network simulator 3 (ns-3)-based simulator organized into a 3-layer stack, composed of: 1) the Underlying Platform, which provides the telecommunication primitives for different standardized protocol stacks; 2) the Core, that implements all the fundamental features of an IoD scenario; and 3) the Simulation Development Platform, mainly composed of a set of tools that speeds up the graphical design for every possible use case. In order to prove the huge potential of this proposal, three different scenarios are presented and analyzed from both a software perspective and a telecommunications standpoint. The peculiarities of this open-source tool are of interest for researchers in academia, as they will be able to extend it to model upcoming specifications, including, but not limited to, mobile and satellite communications. Still, it will certainly be of relevance in industry to accelerate the design phase, thus reducing the time to market of IoD-based services.

Low‐power wide area networks (LPWANs) are gaining momentum within Internet of Things circles, thanks to their inherent capabilities to simplify network topologies and increase coverage in low‐rate and low‐power communications. This study focuses on a specific LPWAN technology, namely Long Range Wireless Area Network (LoRaWAN), which is being widely investigated by the research community worldwide. LoRaWAN offers many noticeable features, including wide coverage areas, security by design, power consumption and bandwidth optimisation, and a high degree of flexibility and reconfigurability. Unfortunately, in spite of these valuable characteristics, LoRaWAN appliances are often closed source and proprietary. To bridge the gap, this study proposes a prototype, which has been designed and set up using open low‐cost experimental boards and programming tools, only. Moreover, an experimental campaign has been carried out in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed platform.