Development of Sophisticated Unmanned Software Systems and Applications to UAV Formation

Abstract

This thesis presents the development of a comprehensive software system for unmanned systems to accomplish complex tasks in practical applications. Specifically, a software system for coordination and control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been developed. The system is capable of performing tasks such as user interactions, flight task scheduling, hardware data retrieval, device operations, control law calculation and servo driving. A scalable software framework, which consists of an onboard system and a ground control system (GCS), is proposed to fulfill the aforementioned requirements. A top-down approach is adopted for analyzing system requirements and modeling software components. To achieve real-time performance, an industry-standard operating system, QNX Neutrino, is customized for the onboard processor. It also adopts a multi-thread architecture to realize efficient task scheduling. The thesis also covers the development of a user-friendly GCS, which monitors the inflight status of UAVs and uploads user commands. A hardware-in-the-loop simulation with different UAV platforms has been integrated to expedite the verification of control laws. With the help of this software system, a full envelop of automatic flight task and a multi-UAV formation application were successfully conducted.