Design and experimental validation of UAV control system software based on the TMO structuring scheme

Abstract

The technologies for designing and validating computer-control systems subject to challenging timing and reliability requirements have been advancing slowly. One such type of systems are unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control systems. The functional complexity of UAV control systems is steadily increasing. Enabling the design of such complex systems in easily understandable forms that are amenable to rigorous analysis is a highly desirable goal. In this paper, we discuss our experimental application of the Time-triggered Message-triggered Object (TMO) structuring scheme to the design of a UAV control system. The TMO scheme enables high-level structuring together with design-time guaranteeing of accurate timings of various critical control actions with significantly smaller efforts than those required when using lower-level structuring schemes based on direct programming of threads, UDP invocations, etc. An experimental 2-step validation of a UAV control system is also discussed. The first step was to validate the system by use of an environment simulator and then real flight tests were involved only in the second step. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.