Coupling multifunction drones with AI in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic

When COVID-19 was declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020, national governments and health authorities across the world begun considering different preventive measures to fight against the coronavirus outbreak. Researchers and tech companies worldwide have been striving to utilize advanced technologies to aid in the fight against the Covid-19 outbreak. This paper aims to couple multifunction drone with AI to deliver wireless services that will help the fight against the Coronavirus pandemic. The proposed drone-eye-system with its thermal imaging cameras and an AI framework utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with its Modified Artificial Neural Network (MANN) for face mask detection of people wearing masks in public. The system can perform basic diagnostic functions such as elevated body temperatures for helping minimize the risk of spreading the infection through close contact. The AI framework evolve an optimized elevation angle $$\uptheta $$ and altitude $${\mathrm{h}}_{\mathrm{t}}$$ to enhance wireless connectivity between a drone and a ground station, which in turn leads to better throughput and power consumption. The proposed framework has been developed using the MATLAB toolbox and shows promising results with an accuracy of face mask detection of 82.63%, with an F1-score of 0.98, and an enhanced by 10% link budget parameters.