Safety unit-based safe behavior assurance for autonomous and semi-autonomous aerial systems: Requirements, concept, and simulation results

Autonomous and semi-autonomous aerial systems (AES) are vehicles which have to perform tasks in complex and dynamic environment, for example in logistics and transportation applications. In this context vehicle's behavior has to be verifiable safe. Here safe behavior denotes interaction with the environment like for example spacial movements with freedom of unacceptable risk. Traditionally, behavioral safety aspects are combined with mission-related tasks. The consequence may be unmanageable vehicle's complexity as well as unpredictable effects during the interaction with the environment leading to inapplicability of traditional safety assurance methods. Furthermore, real-time vehicle's hardware reliability assessment and management are often not considered. This paper introduces a novel simplified real-time environmental situation risk assessment approach for determination of required situational vehicle's reliability. Furthermore, the novel real-time vehicle's hardware reliability assessment and situational hardware structure and behavior control for vehicle's safe behavior assurance is presented. The introduced approach can verify vehicle's safe situational behavior by real-time environmental risk assessment and vehicle's hardware structure and emergency behavior control to minimize the situational risk. The technical proof of concept demonstrates for the first time the successful use of the introduced approach based on AES example using Virtual Robot Experimental Platform and Programmable Logic Controller.