Safety and Reliability Within UAV Construction

Engineering a safe and reliable network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) poses several system-related problems, not dealt with by techniques traditional to the approaches used in reliability engineering. Not only must each component be safe and reliable; it must contribute to the overall emergent properties of the system, such as safety, reliability, and availability. This encompasses intended performance metrics, as well as degradation under failures and interactions with all other system elements. Each subsystem must be designed and composed in a fashion that maintains or increases the overall quality of the system. The integration of the subsystems also needs to be carried out on a local (component-based) as well as global (emergent quality) scale. These ideas are examined in the context of an unmanned aerial vehicle test-bed, which is used for a video-based conflict detection and resolution algorithm