A distributed operating system supporting strong mobility of reconfigurable computing applications in a swarm of unpiloted airborne vehicles

The use of reconfigurable computing in networked and distributed applications is of great interest in supporting the needs of high performance algorithms such as image processing on swarms of small unpiloted airborne vehicles (UAVs). In a swarm each UAV can be considered as a node in a sensor network. The addition of an FPGA to each node allows complex image recognition to be implemented within the restricted power budget of the small UAVs that make up the nodes. In some continuous surveillance applications distributing the processing across several UAVs with mobility of FPGA bit streams between UAVs, depending on the context of the current mission, can an important requirement. This allows UAVs to share the available electrical and processing power in the network or to maintain continuous coverage of the mission as UAV nodes are replaced for refuelling. In this paper we present a distributed operating system for reconfigurable computing that supports distribution and strong mobility of reconfigurable applications across a sensor network based on a swarm of small UAVs. The operating system supports check-pointing of stream based reconfigurable computing applications so that they can be moved during execution between nodes in the network based on the current context of the swarm task. A full prototype of the operating system has been implemented and is being used in an application that involves the search and location of bushfire hotspots. The paper gives some insight into the architecture of the operating system and describes into how application execute on the operating system.