A comprehensive software system architecture for unmanned aerial vehicles

We present in this paper a comprehensive software system architecture for unmanned aerial vehicles. More specifically, a top-down divide and conquer method is utilized in developing the logical representation of the overall system, with standard professional approaches, such as data flow diagram and task structure diagram. The overall system consisting of two unmanned vehicles and a ground control system is demonstrated with both hardware-in-the-loop simulation and practical formation flight tests. We should note that the same architecture can be adopted in other forms of unmanned systems including unmanned ground vehicles and underwater vehicles.