A new doctor in ICARUS!

ABSTRACT:
An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is a low-cost non-piloted airplane designed to operate in D-cube (Dangerous-Dirty-Dull) situations. Many types of UAVs exist today; however with the advent of UAV’s civil applications, the class of mini/micro UAVs is emerging as a valid option in a commercial scenario. This type of UAV shares limitations with most computer embedded systems: limited space, limited power resources, increasing computation requirements, complexity of the applications, time to market requirements, etc. These stringent requirements are highlighted in civil applications. In this case, the same platform should be able to implement a large variety of missions with little reconfiguration time and overhead if it must be economically viable.

The main thesis of this research is a middleware-based architecture specially suited to operate as a flexible payload and mission controller in a UAV. The system is composed of a number of low-cost computing devices connected by a network. The functionality of the system is divided in reusable services that can be distributed over the different nodes of the network. A middleware manages the lifecycle and the communication between services, operating the global system as a Distributed Embedded System. The communication primitives are mainly publish-subscribe based, however two-way synchronous communication, i.e remote procedure calls are also available for the services.

Additional efforts have been placed in some specifics of the UAV avionics domain, in special the interoperation with unreliable and high-latency point-to-point networks. The system not only comprises the hardware onboard the airframe, it can be extended to several UAVs and the ground control station. This problematic is managed by special nodes called Communication Gateways that act as transparent proxies for the services located away. A lot of research has been done in the area of avionics middleware; however it is mainly focused on the control domain and in the real-time operation of the middleware. Our proposal differs in that we address the implementation of easily adaptable and reconfigurable unmanned missions in low-cost and low-resources hardware. The proposed middleware architecture offers simplicity, adaptability, network transparency and a high-level vision that eases the development of this sort of missions.