Reconfigurable automated behavior for UAS applications

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have great potential to be used in a wide variety of applications, such as environmental applications, emergency situations and surveillance tasks, among others. However, most current UAS solutions, if not remotely piloted, rely on waypoint based flight control systems for their navigation and are unable to coordinate the aircraft flight with payload operation. We believe that increased automation, together with reconfiguration capabilities and cost-effectiveness, are key requirements for UAS to be successful in a commercial domain. The resulting platform should be affordable and able to operate in different application scenarios with reduced development effort and human intervention.In this paper, an architecture for providing UAS platforms with reconfigurable automated behavior is presented. The desired automation and reconfiguration capabilities are built upon the core sub-systems in that architecture: the Flight Plan Manager and the Mission Manager. Both systems are part of a wider set of embarked services that manage UAS operations during the mission. The Flight Plan Manager and the Mission Manager are respectively responsible for governing the UAS flight and orchestrating operation of other services on-board the UAS. There are two distinct features of the system: firstly, UAS behavior is not hard-coded into its software components, but described using specification formalisms; secondly, the UAS flight path is described by means of an XML based language specifically designed for this purpose. With this approach, flight and payload behavior are described in separate documents that complement each other. Prototype implementations of these services have been implemented and used to validate the proposed specification and execution methods with an application example devoted to the monitoring of wildfires.