Embodiments herein describe a fog drone that selects, organizes, monitors, and controls a plurality of drones in a fleet. The fog drone receives a job to be completed from a dispatcher and identifies the resources for accomplishing the job such as the amount of material (e.g., fiber optic cable) or the type of drones (e.g., drones with RF antennas or digging implements) needed to execute the job. Using the identified resources, the fog drone estimates the number of drones needed to complete the job and can recruit available drones to form the fleet. Once the fleet is formed, the fog drone determines a number of drones to place on standby to replace active drones if those drones need to recharge or malfunction.