A Requirements-Driven Platform for Validating Field Operations of Small Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles

Flight-time failures of small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) can have a severe impact on people or the environment. Therefore, sUAS applications must be thoroughly evaluated and tested to ensure their adherence to specified requirements, and safe behavior under real-world conditions, such as poor weather, wireless interference, and satellite failure. However, current simulation environments for autonomous vehicles, including sUAS, provide limited support for validating their behavior in diverse environmental contexts and moreover, lack a test harness to facilitate structured testing based on system-level requirements. We address these shortcomings by eliciting and specifying requirements for an sUAS testing and simulation platform, and developing and deploying it. The constructed platform, DroneReq Validator (DRV), allows sUAS developers to define the operating context, configure multi-sUAS mission requirements, specify safety properties, and deploy their own custom sUAS applications in a high-fidelity 3D environment. The DRV Monitoring system collects runtime data from sUAS and the environment, analyzes compliance with safety properties, and captures violations. We report on two case studies in which we used our platform prior to real-world sUAS deployments, in order to evaluate sUAS mission behavior in various environmental contexts. Furthermore, we conducted a study with developers and found that DRV simplifies the process of specifying requirements-driven test scenarios and analyzing acceptance test results.