Framework for incremental development of complex unmanned aircraft systems

In this paper we introduce a modular architecture for command & control (C2) of heterogeneous teams of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that allows for incremental development and verification of complex systems using a mixed-reality concept. This can simplify and speed up the process of deployment on new payloads or control and reasoning algorithms on hardware assets, as well as the process of increasing the number of UAVs in teams. The reason for this is that the proposed architecture allows for verifying only a subset of the hardware assets or deployed hardware devices at a time while the rest of them remain virtualized. The proposed architecture was implemented as C2 framework and used in flight tests for verification of collision avoidance algorithms on two fixed wing UAVs in real world experiments.