Autonomous Flight Control Meets Custom Payload Processing: A Mixed-Critical Avionics Architecture Approach for Civilian UAVs

Multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are interesting for commercial as well as for private use. Simple tasks like aerial photography are well known, but nowadays new scenarios, like on-board video processing or complex sensor data processing, are gaining in importance. These scenarios require high-performance on-board processing which is not available in most of today´s avionics architectures for civilian multi-rotor systems. Due to the limited installation space and weight requirements, the usage of highly integrated Multi-Processor System on Chips (MPSoCs), capable to implement real-time critical flight control algorithms and compute intensive custom payload functions is appealing. This paper presents fundamental requirements on the architecture and flight control algorithms of existing autonomously flying commercial multi-rotor UAVs. On this basis a new approach for an avionics architecture using the Xilinx ZYNQ (MPSoC) is proposed. In combination with the presentation of the proposed architecture new challenges will be discussed that result from the integration of mixed-critical applications on a single chip.