Experimental Evaluation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System Software Based on the TMO Model

Abstract

Over the past few decades, a considerable number of studies have been conducted on the technologies to build an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) control system. Today, focus in research has moved from a standalone control system towards a network-centric control system for multiple UAV systems. 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 evaluation of the Time-triggered Message-triggered Object (TMO) structuring scheme in the design of the 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 lowerlevel structuring schemes based on direct programming of threads, UDP invocations, etc. Our system was validated by use of environment simulator developed based on an open source flight simulator named FlightGear. The TMO-structured UAV control software running on a small computing platform was easily connected to a simulator of the surroundings of the control system, i.e., the rest of the UAV and the flight environment. Positive experiences in both the TMO-structured design and the validation are discussed along with potentials for future expansion in this paper.