Ground control station avionics software development in ANKA UAV

ANKA Program, of which main contractor is Turkish Aerospace Industries Inc., aims at designing and producing a MALE (Medium Altitude Low Endurance) type UAV that has the capacity of 200 km maximum line of sight and 30000 ft maximum altitude. System is made up of two subsystems: air vehicle and ground control station, which have their seperate software development teams and infrastructure. This paper describes the Ground Control Station avionics software development process, technologies used, architecture, and software tools. Ground Control Station (GCS) subsystem is composed of both real-time and non-real time software. The aim of the real time software (referred to as the Air Vehicle Control Software — AVCS) is to command and control the flight and to monitor air vehicle telemetry on Human Machine Interface. This real time software runs on the Integrity RTOS [1] on a hardware platform comprising 2 Single Board Computers (SBC) each of which has PowerPC 7448 CPU. The chassis including these SBCs is called Ground Control Computer (GCC) which is dual-redundant and runs in master slave mode. The redundancy is achieved by a concept called hot-backup. Air Vehicle Control Software is based on Integrity's IMA based time and space partitioning. Real time software includes both manual code (developed in the ANSI C language) as well as model based (auto-generated) code. Model based development is involved in the Human Machine Interface part (for which ‘VAPS’ [2] tool is used) and logic flow part (for which SCADE tool [1] is used). Non-real time software aims at air vehicle and GCS preflight, test data monitoring on flight, telemetry/telecommand data recording, pilot camera video recording and playback, various other data insertion to database and file system and querying from database and files system functionalities. All non-real time software is designed with object-oriented methodology and developed with C# on .NET platform. Real time and non-real time software communicate with each other using Universal Datagram Protocol (UDP). The software is developed to be compliant with DO-178B processes including planning, requirements, design, coding and integration processes and by using supporting development tools.