Abstract:
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Most unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are, at
present, designed for military purposes and very few civil applications have been developed mainly because the lack of a regulation basis concerning
their certification, airworthiness and operations. UAS
operations have always been solutions highly
dependent on the mission to be accomplished and on the scenario of flight. The generalized development of UAS applications is still limited by the absence of
systems that support the development of the actual operations. Most current UAS solutions, if not remotely piloted, rely on waypoint based flight control system for their navigation and are unable to
coordinate the aircraft flight with payload and mission operation.
In this paper, an architecture for providing
automation in UAS application is presented. This architecture is part of a UAS-specific distributed service-oriented architecture designed to enable easy
reconfiguration and deployment of UAS in a wide range of scenarios without (or very little) additional system development. Flight, payload and mission
service coordination, service interfaces and message interactions between services are discussed in this paper. Finally, a preliminary prototype of these
services has been implemented to validate the
purpose architecture specification. Additionally, a helicopter-based UAS is being developed to test in real scenarios the automation capabilities provided by
the USAL architecture. |