The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is excited to release a new key recommendations brief drawn from the recent Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing report. The report lays out a vision for non-military drone infrastructure by 2035 and identifies twelve technical challenges standing in the way. This brief, Key Recommendations for the Future of Drone Computing, outlines the next steps, translating those challenges into specific actions for the four computing communities whose decisions will determine whether that vision is met: scientific funders, policymakers, industry, and academia.
Action is urgent to realize the full potential of non-military drones. The report establishes milestones for 2028, laying the groundwork for its 2035 vision now.
See Key Recommendations for the Future of Drone Computing
Drones as a National Infrastructure
Computing on the Fly envisions a decade in which drones move goods, medical supplies, and information at a scale comparable to national infrastructure investments like highways and the electric grid. Natural disaster detection drones could identify wildfire sources within minutes, medical supply chains could bypass ground congestion to reach rural hospitals, and nationwide fleets could continuously inspect bridges and power lines.
Standing between today’s capabilities and that future is what the report authors call a “capability gap,” where hardware and aspirations are outpacing the software and systems needed to operate safely at scale. Drone research also remains fragmented across communities, which has left the field without a unified vision and put national leadership in the drone space at risk. Closing the gap requires coordination as much as it needs technological advances, as no single sector can close it alone.
Recommendations for Four Communities
The brief organizes its guidance around four groups, each with a distinct role in closing the capability gap:
- Scientific funding agencies, on the shared research infrastructure and program structures the field needs
- Policymakers, on standards, certification, and regulation as technical problems rather than administrative ones
- Industry, on interoperability, security, and what it takes to operate reliably at fleet scale
- Academia, on workforce development and the cross-disciplinary work the field currently lacks
The report identifies significantly scaling domestic drone production as a central, and time-sensitive, goal for this vision. Many of the brief’s cross-cutting recommendations thus revolve around this aim and the different roles each group plays in allowing that to happen.
Read the Key Recommendations Brief
The findings in the full report, as well as this new brief, come from CCC’s 2025 Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing workshop. The workshop — co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society — took place in Washington, DC in December 2025, convening experts across academia, industry, and government to envision the future of drone computing. These conversations were synthesized in the full Computing on the Fly report by lead authors Kevin Butler (University of Florida), Christopher Stewart (The Ohio State University), Nils Aschenbruck (Osnabrück University), Weisong Shi (University of Delaware), Ufuk Topcu (University of Texas), and Deborah Silver (Rutgers University).
To read the most critical recommendations from the report, read the brief below.
Read the Brief
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award Nos. 2300842 and 2619366. These awards support the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), a programmatic committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
