UAV payload and mission control hardware/software architecture

This paper presents an embedded hardware/software architecture specially designed to be applied on mini/micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). An UAV is low-cost non-piloted airplane designed to operate in D-cube (Dangerous-Dirty-Dull) situations [8]. Many types of UAVs exist today; however with the advent of UAV's civil applications, the class of mini/micro UAVs is emerging as a valid option in a commercial scenario. This type of UAV shares limitations with most computer embedded systems: limited space, limited power resources, increasing computation requirements, complexity of the applications, time to market requirements, etc. UAVs are automatically piloted by an embedded system named “Flight Control System”. Many of those systems are commercially available today, however no commercial system exists nowadays that provides support to the actual mission that the UAV should perform. This paper introduces a hardware/software architecture specially designed to operate as a flexible payload and mission controller in a mini/micro UAV. Given that the missions UAVs can carry on justify their existence, we believe that specific payload and mission controller s for UAV should be developed. Our architectonic proposal for them orbits around four key elements: a LAN based distributed and scalable hardware architecture, a service/subscription based software architecture and an abstraction communication layer.Peer Reviewe

Ensayan entregas de paquetería con drones en la playa de Castelldefels

Los vuelos se hicieron por encima de corredores cerrados al público para garantizar todas las medidas de seguridad exigidas. La actividad forma parte de un conjunto de evaluaciones que se realizarán en diversos países europeos a lo largo del año 2022Diari El LlobregatPostprint (author's final draft

The ARCHADE: ubiquitous supercomputing for robotics. Part I: philosophy

In this work, we introduce Ubiquitous Supercomputing for robotics with the objective of opening our imagination to the development of new powerful heterogeneous multi-robot systems able to perform all kind of missions. Supercomputing, also known as High Performance computing (HPC) is the tool that allows us to predict the weather, understand the origins of the universe, create incredibly realistic fantasy movies, send personalized advertisement to millions of users worldwide and much more. Robotics has been mostly absent in its use of HPC but some previous works have lightly flirted with it. With the findings presented in here, we propose a ubiquitous supercomputing ontology, which allows describing systems made up of robots, traditional HPC infrastructures, sensors, actuators and people and exhibiting scalability, user-transparency and ultimately higher computing efficiency. Moreover, we present a technology called The ARCHADE, which facilitates the development, implementation and operation of such systems, and we propose a mechanism to define and automatize missions carried out by ubiquitous supercomputing systems. As a proof of concept, we present a system depicted as Tigers VS Hunters, which illustrates the potential of this technology. The results presented in here are part of a two series work introducing The ARCHADE. This first delivery presents its philosophy and main features. Correspondingly the second part will present a set of use cases and a complete performance benchmark. Supercomputing is part of our lives and it can be found in many research and industrial endeavors. With the ubiquitous supercomputing ontology and The ARCHADE, supercomputing will become part of robotics as well, bringing it therefore everywhere.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A macroscopic performance analysis of NASA’s northrop grumman RQ-4A

This work was partially funded by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of Spain under Contract TRA2016-77012-R and by EUROCONTROL acting on behalf of the SESAR Joint Undertaking (the SJU) and the European Union as part of Work Package E in the SESAR ProgrammeThis paper presents the process of identification, from a macroscopic point of view, of the Northrop Grumman RQ-4A Global Hawk Remote-Piloted Aircraft System from real, but limited flight information. Performance parameters and operational schemes will be extracted by analyzing available data from two specific science flights flown by the Global Hawk back in 2010. Each phase of the flight, take-off, climb, cruise climb, descent and landing, is analyzed from various points of view: speed profile, altitude, climb/descent ratios and rate of turn. The key performance parameters derived from individual flights will be confirmed by performing a wider statistical validation with additional flight trajectories. Derived data are exploited to validate a simulated RQ-4A vehicle employed in extensive real-time air traffic management simulated integration exercises and to complement the development of a future RQ-4A trajectory predictor.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Real-time simulations to evaluate the RPAS integration in shared airspace

This paper presents the work done during the first year in the WP-E project ERAINT (Evaluation of the RPAS-ATM Interaction in Non-Segregated Airspace) that intends to evaluate by means of human-in-the-loop real-time simulations the interaction between a Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) and the Air Traffic Management (ATM) when a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) is being operated in shared airspace. This interaction will be evaluated from three different perspectives. First, the separation management, its results are presented in this paper. Secondly, during the next year, the contingency management, also including loss of link situations and, lastly, the capacity impact of such operations in the overall ATM system. The used simulation infrastructure allows to simulate realistic exercises from both the RPAS Pilot-in-Command (PiC) and the Air Traffic Controller (ATCo) perspectives. Moreover, it permits to analyze the actual workload of the ATC and to evaluate several support tools and different RPAS levels of automation from the PiC and ATC sides. The simulation results and the usefulness of the support tools are presented for each selected concept of operations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Modular Avionics for Seamless Reconfigurable UAS Missions

Abstract Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture is a trend in current avionics that employs a partitioned environment in which different avionics functions share a unique computing environment. UAS avionics, especially in small UAS, are usually of less complexity than not the present on airliners, however, in real autonomous UAS, the onboard avionics should control not only the flight and navigation but also the mission and payload of the aircraft. This involves more complex software as it should implement “intelligent” or at least autonomous behavior. This need of both flexibility and complexity management while keeping low costs in the UAS avionics field requires new architectures to cope with. In this article, we describe a modular avionics architecture based on services. The avionics functionality is divided in distributed elements, the services, which are interconnected by a communication middleware. This article also proposes a configuration and deployment infrastructure and its related procedures that complete our vision of UAS avionics.Peer Reviewe

Flexible Electrical Manager Service for UAS Applications Development

Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) are becoming viable aerial platforms for civil oriented monitoring applications. However, in most cases the selected UAS platforms are ad-hoc vehicles which include highly heterogeneous avionics. Avionics on-board may be COSTS modules that have highly different non-standard power requirements. Additionally, the available power sources in these UAS may be fairly limited or even restricted to battery units. This paper introduces the ELectrical Manager Service (ELMS), an on-board system in charge of offering a flexible power supply architecture that supports minimal reconfiguration overhead for a wide variety of UAS missions. The ELMS Service is designed to offer a continuous monitoring of the state of the power network, and a coherent and controlled response in front of power supply contingencies. The ELMS will monitor the batteries and generator status, the power consumption of the avionics and other systems, manage the connection/disconnections of systems, and provide power availability estimations. The ELMS Service is part of an architecture designed to facilitate the execution of UAS civil missions, the USAL. The USAL is built as a set of cooperating services in a purely distributed and scalable architecture with a middleware that manages inter-service communications.Postprint (published version

The future of drones and their public acceptance

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Any emergent technology in history has raised an initial rejection by part of the society. Added to the several problems that the non-mature technology may have, the lack of any previous experience about side effects and the human’s psychological fear to the unknown play an important influence in its acceptance. As drones bring up high social and economical expectations due to their capabilities and bussiness applications, the social acceptance is key to the complete development of drone technology's potential. Experts believe that social acceptance is ruled by a balance between beneficial usages and inconvenient issues regarding the technology. This balance in the aeronautical sector is also conditioned by the strict safety policies and regulations of the airspace and the current airspace users. To analyse this balance situation in actual and future environments, regarding drone technology, different use cases will be presented. These use cases have been proposed and analysed by different stakeholders from the U-space community network, a network of airspace and drone stakeholders who participated in the context of the SESAR CORUS project.\par The purpose of this paper is to analyse some of these use cases by obtaining responses from different stakeholders point of view using a survey in order to see how economical, safety and political aspects are balanced in each one of the cases. From the survey responses we will perform an analysis by means of three different acceptance indicators, one for each aspect commented. Main results and conclusions point out that the economical indicator is, in general, positive, especially for the low cost payload use cases. In contrast the economical indicator is close to neutral for city transport and airports use cases, which leads to propose some economical promotion action may be needed to make them a reality. For the safety indicator we observe that they are close to negative values as use case complexity increases. Thus we can conclude that some of the proposed missions start affecting the current levels of safety. Finally, the political indicator is mostly neutral, with some positive trends for scenarios related with inspection tasks or done in non-populated areas.We thank our colleagues from the SESAR CORUS initia-tive: the project partners developping the use cases and theconcept of operation; and the U-space community network,who provided insight and expertise that greatly assisted theresearch. We also thank all our colleagues from the ICARUSResearch group (UPC) for the assistance with the surveys andfor the comments that greatly improved the manuscript.This work has been partially funded by the Ministry ofScience, Innovation and Universities of Spain under grantnumber TRA2016-77012-R and by the SESAR Joint Under-taking under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research andinnovation programme under grant agreement RIA-763551.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Service abstraction layer for UAV flexible application development

An Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) is an uninhabited airplane, piloted by embed- ded avionics and supervised by an operator on ground. Unmanned Aerial Systems were designed to operate in dangerous situations, like military missions. With the avionics tech- nological evolution, Unmanned Aerial Systems also become a valid option for commercial applications, specially for dull and tedious surveillance applications. Cost considerations will also deviate some mission done today with conventional aircrafts to Unmanned Aerial Systems. In order to build economically viable UAS solutions, the same platform should be able to implement a variety of missions with little reconfiguration time and overhead. This paper describes a software abstraction layer for a Unmanned Aerial System distributed architecture. The proposed abstraction layer allows the easy and fast design of missions and solves in a cost-effective way the reusability of the system. The distributed architecture of the Unmanned Aerial System is service oriented. Func- tional units are implemented as independent services that interact each other using commu- nication primitives in a network centric approach. The paper presents a set of predefined services useful for reconfigurable civil missions and the directives for their communication.Postprint (published version

Assessment of the North European free route airspace deployment

Free Route Airspace is an operational concept for the modernization of the airspace, addressed to improving the efficiency of the flights. It also aims at the environmental friendly performance area by reducing the emissions from fuel burnt. But these benefits should not derive in a loss of safety. Several areas are introducing free route as part of the Single European Sky Airspace Research programme (SESAR). This paper assesses the Northern Europe Free Route Airspace deployment, where two SESAR solutions are combined: the Free Route Airspace and the Functional Airspace Blocks. This assessment is produced using fast-time simulations and presented from a safety perspective using two indicator sets: the aircraft loss of separation and the airspace complexity. The number of potential separation losses, together with complexity metrics, such as adjusted density, potential horizontal, vertical and/or speed interactions, are presented for different free route deployment status. Results reflect that from the safety perspective the free route deployment in North Europe did not present notable changes in terms of the selected indicators, despite of the increase of traffic of last years.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft