Flight Control And Management Software Design For Small UAV

With the increasingly widespread use and complex functionality of UAVs, flight environmentwas full of uncertainty and variability. The requirements for reliability and real-time performance offlight control and management software were seriously challenged. The traditional design of thesoftware could not meet the growing demands of performance of UAV system, so introducing RTOSfor the flight control and management software was necessary. In this paper, a flight control andmanagement software of small UAVs based on VxWorks was designed and developed. The softwarefocused on real-time performance and reliability design to improve real-time and robust performance.Firstly, according to the function requirements of the flight control and management softwareand characteristic of VxWorks, the overall design was given, and then the structure design andfunction modules division of the software were also completed. This subject solved some significantproblems, including the transplant of VxWorks, devices driver designing and standard packaging,driver registering and other critical issues.Secondly, considering the requirements of function and performance of the flight control andmanagement software, this subject designed and developed the modules of sensor management, faultmanagement, navigation management, control management, actuator management and other modules.According to multitasking operating mechanism of VxWorks, function modules were divided intotasks which were assigned different priorities, meanwhile the interaction design between differenttasks was also completed.Once more, the FlightGear software was developed to design the serial communication interfacebetween the flight control and management system and the FlightGear. Two kinds ofthree-dimensional visualization simulation that based on built-in dynamics model of FlightGear andsimulate data were realized.Finally, the performance test of the software was given, and the semi-physical simulation wasachieved under three kinds of flight mode, including autonomous control, instruction control andmanual control. The results showed that the flight control and management software met the designrequirements of function and had good real-time performance and reliability.