A civil military functional safety management (FSM) development assurance (DA) open integrated modular avionics (IMA) framework example for certification of autonomous VTOL unmanned aerial systems (UAS)

Daniel P. Schrage, J. V.R. Prasad, Eric N. Johnson, Suresh Kannan

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Military and commercial aviation communities are pushing for stricter certifications of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) as the national airspace (NAS) becomes more congested and the need for military autonomous UAS evolves. A crowded NAS means increased danger of underdeveloped, under-certified unmanned systems flying alongside manned aircraft. Meanwhile, the use of multicore processors has risen for use in both manned and unmanned aircraft certification, but security concerns continue to pester the aviation community. The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to unmanned aircraft-flying in the national airspace and the military need for autonomous UAS. Government regulation will forever be playing catch-up, but it is critical that the regulators and avionics designers stay ahead of the game when it comes to certifying software and hardware on unmanned aircraft as they have done with manned platforms, especially in the area of certifying multicore technology. Industry officials are seeing a push toward ensuring that both manned and unmanned aircraft follow similar - if not the same - safety procedures. Unfortunately, unmanned system certification continues to lag even as more UAS take to the skies. To address the situation, the aviation community is increasingly looking at using DO-178/DO-254/DO-297 for inclusion with ARP 4754A and ARP 4761 for certifications. This paper will address how a Civil Military (CM) Functional Safety Management (FSM) Development Assurance (DA) Framework has been developed for certification and applied to a variety of projects in the Georgia Tech School of AE Graduate Course in Safety By Design (SBD) and Flight Certification (FC). This paper will show how it is being extended to include Open Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architectures for autonomous UAS. A baseline semi-autonomous UAS, the GTMax, developed and demonstrated in the Georgia Tech DARPA Software Enabled Control (SEC) for Intelligent UAVs Program, will be used as a Baseline example. This will include presentation on how the following Georgia Tech SEC technologies were demonstrated: Neural network adaptive flight control, Mode transitioning and adaptive control, Fault tolerant control, Envelop protection and Vision-aided inertial navigation. It will include illustrating the first use of an Open Control Platform (OCP) transition management as a Real Time Operating System (RTOS) through combined Software and Hardware in the Loop Simulation and Flight Testing. This will be followed by discussion on how an Open IMA architecture can be inserted in the Civil Military FSM DA Framework and plans of its inclusion in an autonomous UAS Testbed.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2021
Event9th Biennial Autonomous VTOL Technical Meeting and 8th Annual Electric VTOL Symposium - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jan 26 2021Jan 28 2021

Conference

Conference9th Biennial Autonomous VTOL Technical Meeting and 8th Annual Electric VTOL Symposium
CityVirtual, Online
Period1/26/211/28/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Aerospace Engineering

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