Increasing UAV capabilities through autopilot and flight plan abstraction

This paper presents two novel avionics subsystems that aim at overcoming two clearly identified drawbacks of current UAV technology. Firstly, on board exploitation of autopilot telemetry is a complex and autopilot dependent task. Secondly, the flight plan definition mechanism available in most autopilots is just a collection of waypoints. This approach has several limitations, among them its inability to allow interaction between the flight plan and the mission in progress. The Flight Control System Gateway is a component designed to facilitate exploitation of data obtained from the autopilot. It provides a hardware-independent interface that isolates payload components from the autopilot specificities, thus eliminating dependencies on a particular autopilot solution. The Flight Plan Manager is a subsystem that interacts with the FCS Gateway in order to direct the flight of the UAV. It follows a flight plan described via a novel specification mechanism and sends commands to the FCS Gateway for its execution. The specification formalism improves on current mechanisms by introducing higher level constructs and enabling interaction with other payload components. These subsystems are integrated into an overall avionics solution which is based on an innovative publish/subscribe service based software architecture and a LAN based distributed hardware architecture.