Abstract
We show how the limited electrical power and FPGA compute resources available in a swarm of small UAVs can be shared by moving FPGA tasks from one UAV to another. A software and hardware infrastructure that supports the mobility of embedded FPGA applications on a single FPGA chip and across a group of networked FPGA chips is an integral part of the work described here. It is shown how to allocate a single FPGA's resources at run time and to share a single device through the use of application checkpointing, a memory controller, and an on-chip run-time reconfigurable network. A prototype distributed operating system is described for managing mobile applications across the swarmbased on the contents of a fuzzy rule base. It can move applications between UAVs in order to equalize power use or to enable the continuous replenishment of fully fueled planes into the swarm.
Highlights
The term swarm is usually identified with a group of living organisms who arrange themselves to cooperate to achieve a common task that no one of them could complete as an individual
field programmable gate array (FPGA) are an appropriate platform for small UAVs because they have low power requirements yet can compute high complexity tasks such as image processing
We have shown that mobility of FPGA tasks between members of the swarm will allow a swarm to be active for a longer period of time or allow the continuous replacement of members of the swarm
Summary
The term swarm is usually identified with a group of living organisms who arrange themselves to cooperate to achieve a common task that no one of them could complete as an individual. UAVs that cooperate to achieve a common task (such as geolocation) in an autonomous way (using agents) have been given by analogy the title of swarm in this paper. This is the first time an operating system for reconfigurable computing has been implemented to execute practical embedded applications.
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