# 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 |
| **DuckDB spatial** | Extension adding a GEOMETRY type and `ST_*` functions; used for separation audits, perimeter predicates, and trajectory analysis in the local planar frame |
| **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 |
| **ed25519** | Modern elliptic-curve signature scheme; the SSH key type provisioned per device and per operation |
| **Forced command** | `command="…"` restriction in `authorized_keys`: the key can execute exactly one predefined operation — the key *is* the API |
| **ControlMaster** | SSH connection multiplexing: one persistent authenticated session carries many transfers/commands |
| **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 |