Hardware and RTOS Design of a Flight Controller for Professional Applications

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the civil sector have recently evolved from being devices for recreational uses to becoming aircraft for professional uses. Professional applications of these devices require the aircraft to ship more and more complex sensors for reasons of safety in the event of failures. However, controlling all these systems is a challenge for flight controllers at the hardware and software levels. In this context, this work proposes a new aircraft real-time flight control system. The flight controller hardware is made up of two systems: a core board houses common sensor and flight devices; a flexible unit, isolated from body vibrations, houses redundant sensors to improve accuracy and reliability. The application functions are driven by the microcontroller running a new real-time operating system (RTOS) to better schedule works on limited computation power. To design a simplified RTOS for embedded systems, a hybrid scheduler (first-come-first-serve scheduling and earliest-deadline-first scheduling) with dynamic priority is proposed. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the system using schedulability tests for uni-processor systems. A set of real data supports the performance of the flight controller.

Keywords

• Flight controller
• real-time operating system
• unmanned aerial vehicles