S/W Fault-tolerant OFP System for UAVs based on Partition Computing

Partition computing of the new Integrated Modular Avionics architecture reduces the heavy cabling of traditional federated architecture. On the other hand, fault-tolerant Operational Flight Programs (OFP) for unmanned aerial vehicles have usually been implemented as primary-backup systems based on dual nodes. However, in the case of a small UAV, it is preferred to implement a S/W fault-tolerant system that runs primary and recovery systems together in a single flight control computer to reduce the payload. In this case, because the primary and backup must not interfere with each other in using CPU and memory, it is common to use virtualization-based partitions. In this paper, a new S/W fault-tolerant OFP based on the real-time-object partition, TMO.p, is presented to overcome the large overheads of virtualization approaches.