docs: on-prem data platform proposal for autonomous drone swarms

Problem statement, on-board architecture, Parquet/DuckDB storage design,
swarm sync strategy, zero-trust networking, environments, observability,
CI/CD delivery with fleet release manifests, roadmap and open questions.

docs/00-glossary.md

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+# 00 — Glossary
+
+Terms and abbreviations used throughout this proposal.
+
+## Data & storage
+
+| Term | Meaning |
+| --- | --- |
+| **Parquet** | Columnar file format; compresses time series extremely well (ZSTD + delta encoding), supports predicate pushdown |
+| **Hive partitioning** | Directory layout `key=value/…` understood by most engines; enables partition pruning (only relevant directories are read) |
+| **DuckDB** | In-process analytical SQL engine; queries Parquet globs directly, no server to operate |
+| **ZSTD** | Zstandard compression; the default codec for all Parquet files here |
+| **DWH** | Data warehouse — here: the on-prem ground store holding every flight ever flown |
+| **Hot / warm / cold tiers** | Storage floors ordered by access latency and retention: in-memory window → local NVMe → ground warehouse |
+| **Sealing** | Compacting many small streamed Parquet files into one final file per partition once a time window closes |
+| **UUIDv7** | Time-ordered UUID; sortable by creation time, used as the canonical flight identifier |
+| **Schema registry** | Versioned catalog of dataset schemas so producers and consumers can evolve independently |
+| **ETL** | Extract, transform, load — the pipelines that move and reshape data between tiers |
+
+## Swarm & robotics
+
+| Term | Meaning |
+| --- | --- |
+| **UAV / UGV / USV / UUV** | Unmanned aerial / ground / surface / underwater vehicle |
+| **Swarm** | Group of autonomous vehicles coordinating without a central controller |
+| **Sustainable pulsing** | Swarm ability to repeatedly engage a target area from multiple directions and self-reorganize as conditions evolve |
+| **Ubiquitous sensing** | The swarm acting as one distributed sensor, fusing local observations into shared situational awareness ("top sight") |
+| **Man-in-the-loop** | A human supervises intent and boundaries but does not steer individual vehicles |
+| **GPS-denied** | Operating without satellite positioning; position comes from visual odometry and relative localization |
+| **Visual odometry** | Estimating a vehicle's motion from its own camera stream |
+| **ROS 2** | Robot Operating System 2 — the de-facto middleware for robotics software; nodes exchange typed messages over topics |
+| **DDS** | Data Distribution Service — the default ROS 2 transport middleware |
+| **Zenoh** | Pub/sub + query protocol designed for constrained, dynamic networks; official ROS 2 RMW implementation exists |
+| **YOLO-like detector** | Family of single-pass object-detection models; the on-board video service runs one of them, weights are swappable |
+| **IMU** | Inertial measurement unit — accelerometer + gyroscope (+ magnetometer) |
+| **LiDAR** | Laser-based distance sensing |
+| **RSSI** | Received signal strength indicator; Wi-Fi signal strength, usable as a coarse relative-positioning signal |
+| **C2** | Command and control — the narrow channel that delivers mission intent to the swarm |
+
+## Infrastructure & delivery
+
+| Term | Meaning |
+| --- | --- |
+| **Air-gapped** | No route to the internet, physically or logically |
+| **On-prem** | Runs on owned hardware; no public cloud involvement |
+| **Zero trust** | No implicit trust from network position; every peer authenticates with pre-provisioned credentials |
+| **mTLS** | Mutual TLS — both sides of a connection present certificates |
+| **PKI** | Public key infrastructure — the certificate authority hierarchy behind mTLS |
+| **WireGuard** | Lightweight encrypted tunnel protocol; basis for the swarm mesh overlay |
+| **Ad-hoc mesh** | Wireless network formed directly between peers, no fixed infrastructure |
+| **Docker Compose** | Declarative multi-container runtime; the only orchestrator on board a drone |
+| **k3s** | Lightweight Kubernetes distribution; used on the ground only |
+| **Dev Container** | Reproducible containerized development environment definition |
+| **MinIO** | S3-compatible object store; runs on-board for derived data and on the ground as the warehouse backend |
+| **Registry mirror** | Local copy of a container registry inside the air gap; drones pull images from it |
+| **OTA** | Over-the-air update — delivered before a mission while docked, never mid-flight |
+| **Fleet release manifest** | A versioned lockfile pinning every artifact (image digests, model weights, schemas, configs) that defines one fleet version |
+| **SemVer** | Semantic versioning (`MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH`) applied to every artifact and to the fleet manifest itself |
+| **Trivy** | Open-source scanner for container images and dependencies |
+| **SonarQube** | Static code-quality and security analysis platform |
+| **nvidia-container-toolkit** | Runtime hook exposing GPUs to containers; needed for on-board inference |
+| **HIL** | Hardware-in-the-loop testing — real flight hardware wired into a simulated environment |
+| **CRDT** | Conflict-free replicated data type; merges concurrent updates without coordination |