Systematic verification of operational flight program through reverse engineering

Abstract

Software reverse engineering is an engineering process analyzing a system for specific purposes such as identifying interrelationship between system components or reorganizing the system structure. The HELISCOPE project aims to develop an unmanned helicopter and its on-flight embedded computing system for navigation and real-time transmission of motion video using wireless communication schemes. The OFP (Operational Flight Program) in HELISCOPE project keeps only informal and non-standardized documents and has made us difficult to analyze and test it thoroughly. This paper introduces a verification plan through reverse engineering to get over the difficulties, and we share an experimentation about a small portion of the plan to the HELISCOPE OFP. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.