Autonomous drones for disasters management: Safety and security verifications

Information plays a key role in natural disaster crisis management and relief. We discussed in previous contributions how lightweight Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or (micro-)drones can effectively assist rescuers in order to improve the situational awareness and assessment (Aprvrille et. al, 2014) and (Tanzi et al., 2014). The paper discusses how SysML-Sec/TTool can be efficiently used for formally verifying the safety and security of an autonomous drone mission and flight. More specifically, we consider the architecture of the system that we have used in the scope of the drone4u project. A Parrot platform is used to capture videos of its surroundings. Those videos are transmitted by the UAV to a remote computer, which autonomously controls the drone according to its mission. We have modeled the UAV embedded system (properly speaking the drone capturing the videos, connecting to a WIFI network, and applying remote orders), as well as the communication itself, and the processing performed by the remote control computer.