Author:
Norbert Oswald
Affiliation:
European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company - EADS, Germany
Keyword(s):
Software architecture, autonomous system, modelling.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems
;
Modeling, Simulation and Architectures
;
Robotics and Automation
;
Vehicle Control Applications
Abstract:
Future unmanned aerial systems demand capabilities to perform missions automatically to the greatest possible extent. Missions like reconnaissance, surveillance, combat, or SEAD usually consist of recurring phases and contain resembling or identical portions such as autonomous flight control, sensor processing, data transmission, communication or emergency procedures. To avoid implementing many similar singular solutions, a systematic approach for the design of an unmanned avionic software architecture is needed. Current approaches focus on a coarse system design, do not integrate off-the-shelf middleware, and do not consider the needs for having on-board intelligence. This paper presents a reference software architecture to design and implement typical missions of unmanned aerial vehicles based on a CORBA middleware. The architecture is composed of identical components and rests upon the peer-to-peer architectural style. It describes the internal structure of a single component with
respect to autonomous requirements and provides a framework for the rapid development and implementation of new components. The framework separates functionality and middleware by hiding ORB specific statements
from components. Experimental tests simulating a reconnaissance mission using various ORB implementations indicate the benefits of having an architectural design supporting multi-lingual multi-process distributed applications.
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