Communication Support for Collaborative Embedded Controllers in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

The application areas for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become diverse and quite complicate. Most of such intelligent UAV software runs on few to many embedded controllers connected through a relatively small area network. Thus the support to provide efficient communication between embedded controllers is very important to UAV software. In this paper, we aim to design and implement communication support for distributed embedded systems in UAVs. Toward this end, we propose a lightweight layered architecture of the communication protocol, which can provide low and predictable communication overhead but also portability across different network interconnections. In addition, we apply ARINC 653 to provide suitable programming interfaces and features for UAV software. We have implemented the proposed design in the Linux operating system and measured its performance over Ethernet network. The performance measurement results show that the communication latency of our communication protocol can reduce the communication overhead up to 82% compared with TCP/IP.