Drones can be used for beneficial applications such as inspecting large agriculture areas and transporting medicine to isolated places. The benefits of drones can however only be fully realized when they are allowed to autonomously fly long distances Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS). To allow safe and efficient autonomous BVLOS flights, the European initiative SESAR came out with the concept of U-space as a way to integrate drones into the already populated airspace. There is however currently no open high-level software architecture that realizes the concept of U-space services for autonomous BVLOS operations. In this work, we present an initial proposal of such a system, a service-oriented architecture named ROS-DOTS. We follow a modular design that supports the integration of services that can be modified and replaced independently. The benefit of our modular design is the use of high-level abstraction models for drone operations, using modular services that are developed independently between each other.

To show the potential of ROS-DOTS, we present a use case where several services in the architecture and a commercial drone traffic management system work together to generate a flight plan for a drone operation, that then can be retrieved from our system and uploaded into a drone.