Safe software system development framework for mini unmanned aerial systems

Date

2014

Author

Altan, Önder

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Due to the rapid growth of the utilization of Mini Unmanned Aerial Systems (MUAS) in populated areas, system safety concerns regarding these systems are becoming more important more than ever. Reliability and robustness of the software systems (SS), which are embedded within MUASs to handle their autonomy, should be assured by applying safe development methodologies. This thesis introduces a unique and comprehensive software framework for design, implementation and testing of MUAS software systems, which ensures desired software system safety is achieved with reasonable effort by prioritizing and applying software safety (software airworthiness) concept. The proposed software framework increases software reliability as it simplifies and assures the implementation of fault detection, tolerance and recovery mechanisms, and focuses on software system robustness by identifying failure conditions of the software in MUASs. Besides, as the framework focuses on simple development approach, it tries to reduce efforts undertaken to perform safety analysis and reviews in the development life cycle. In addition to design and implementation methodologies provided by the framework; mission based, full autonomous and simple testing methodology (Assassin Process Method, APM) is introduced in the framework to improve entire software system safety. Moreover, autonomous APM helps small MUAS teams during development phase by providing human readable test verification results as a test assessment report. Through this thesis, the framework as well as the philosophy behind why such framework is necessary, important and unique is explained in detail. Finally, all contributions of the idea to safe software development for MUASs are presented through a prototype in which the verification and tests of the intended software system have been performed. In the prototype, a MUAS’s software system, which is developed by using the suggested framework for a created case, is embedded into a hardware architecture, and using hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation as a real-time integration environment, system verification process is iterated for safe software system development steps introduced in the framework

Subject Keywords

Drone aircraft., Software engineering., Reliability (Engineering)., Security systems., Real-time programming.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12617700/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/23967

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis