Development of an Onboard Software System for Mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Based on VxWorks

  • Authors:

  • Xiaoning Ma;Jiancheng Fang;Wei Sheng

  • Affiliations:

  • Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science for National Defense, Novel Inertial Instrument & Navigation System Technology, Beijing, China 100191;Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science for National Defense, Novel Inertial Instrument & Navigation System Technology, Beijing, China 100191;Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science for National Defense, Novel Inertial Instrument & Navigation System Technology, Beijing, China 100191

  • Venue:
  • ICIRA '08 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications: Part I
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The development of flight software for mini unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is presented in this paper. The flight software, based on the embedded real-time operating system VxWorks, performs multiple tasks including data acquisition, strapdown solution, kalman filter, flight control, communication and fault handling. The framework of flight software and scheme of module partitioning is discussed in the paper. The flight software is established upon a group of processes with each process carrying out a specific task. Inter-process synchronization, mutual exclusion and shared data protection are performed by different methods to ensure reliability and efficiency. The programs executing algorithms including strapdown, kalman filter and control laws are reentrant in order to ensure thread safety. At last, several tests are held and the results proved that multi-task mechanism has remarkably improved the reliability and real-time capability of mini UAV flight software.