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Net4Drones - An Innovative Avionics Network For Small-Duty Aircrafts and Drones

This thesis proposal aims to develop an innovative avionics network for small aircraft and drones using commercial off-the-shelf components. Currently, drones lack safe and reliable mission capabilities due to limitations of current technology. The proposal will survey existing aircraft and drone networks, specify a new network architecture using COTS components, and implement the network to demonstrate reduced costs, weight and improved flexibility over traditional networks. The student will work with industry partners and researchers to develop scheduling, synchronization and routing mechanisms to guarantee timing requirements for critical data transmission. The goal is a high performance, flexible and lower cost protocol for real-time communication in small aircraft and drones.

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33 views3 pages

Net4Drones - An Innovative Avionics Network For Small-Duty Aircrafts and Drones

This thesis proposal aims to develop an innovative avionics network for small aircraft and drones using commercial off-the-shelf components. Currently, drones lack safe and reliable mission capabilities due to limitations of current technology. The proposal will survey existing aircraft and drone networks, specify a new network architecture using COTS components, and implement the network to demonstrate reduced costs, weight and improved flexibility over traditional networks. The student will work with industry partners and researchers to develop scheduling, synchronization and routing mechanisms to guarantee timing requirements for critical data transmission. The goal is a high performance, flexible and lower cost protocol for real-time communication in small aircraft and drones.

Uploaded by

rarseverino
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Thesis Proposal

Net4Drones – An innovative Avionics Network for Small-duty Aircrafts


and Drones
Descrição e enquadramento do projeto
Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPVs) or simply drones can perform air operations that manned
aircrafts struggle with, and their use brings significant economic savings and environmental
benefits whilst reducing the risk to human harm for several activities. However, the current state
of technology in drones still does not allow such missions to be carried out in a safe, secure,
reliable and flexible way on the one hand, on the other hand, the direct usage of aircraft industry
components for increasing mission reliability imposes important drawbacks in terms of weight,
volume, cost and energy requirements. Therefore, it becomes necessary to look for ways to
address these flight safety requirements while keeping the RPV costs low and functionality high.

In the case of manned aircraft, which are in a state of technological maturity far more advanced
than the RPVs, the avionic architectures have converged to what is called Distributed Integrated
Modular Avionics (DIMA), representing the optimum point in terms of compatibility of cost /
functionality with aeronautical certification requirements and thus, appearing as the main
candidate to meet the recent needs of the RPVs regarding high maturity architectures.

Since these architectures are typically sensitive to the latency one needs to provide guarantees
on data transmission times considered to be critical. These architectures are dependent on a
predictable avionics’ communication networks, which typically is guaranteed (in manned
aircrafts) using AFDX. However, the implementation of AFDX becomes quite expensive, since it
cannot be done using Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Ethernet components. In addition, its
switch-based topology, designed for large aircrafts, is not adequate for small aircrafts.

Hence, in this Thesis proposal we aim at implementing an innovative digital network using
COTS components, taking advantage of the reduced distances between the various avionic
components, while guaranteeing the same timeliness and reliability requirements found in
traditional avionics networks. The student will survey the current state-of-the-art on aircraft and
drone communication networks and propose, based on inputs from the industrial partners, a
new COTS-based avionics network. The student will also help implementing and specifying the
necessary scheduling, synchronization, and routing mechanisms.

Such proposal, if instantiated in appropriate hardware, and carefully improved to handle such
class of applications, could have the potential to become a stepping stone towards the design of
a high performance, flexible and simpler protocol, to handle hard real-time communications in
small duty aircrafts and drones. This will reduce costs, weight, and space.

The student will be given relevant training and the opportunity to work in a challenging, applied
research kind of environment, in close collaboration with an important industry players in the
aircraft industry (EMBRAER – Aircraft Manufacturer), at CISTER-Labs and supported by its
researchers, in line with the European project ADACORSA1 and other national funded projects.

Objetivos
1. Survey of aircraft and drone avionics networks and architectures;
2. Training with Real-time OS.
3. Requirements elicitation.
4. Specification of the network architecture.
5. Implementation of the solution with COTS hardware.
6. Performance analysis of the final solution.
7. Thesis writing and writing of a scientific paper.

Details
Supervisor: Ricardo Severino ([email protected] )
Co-Supervisor: Patrick Yomsi ([email protected] )
Facilities: CISTER-Labs facilities: CISTER Research Centre, Rua Alfredo Allen, 535, 4200-135
Porto (Next to ISEP).
Schedule: the student has the flexibility to accommodate his academics activities in the best
possible fashion.

CISTER Research Unit


CISTER is multi-institutionally framed by ISEP (main hosting institution) and FEUP. It is a world
leading research unit in the areas of Real-Time Embedded Computing Systems (RTECS) and
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), with researchers from 20+ different nationalities, and has more
than 300 international partners in academia and industry. CISTER is the only research unit in
Portugal, in the areas of ECE and CS, to top-rank as “Excellent” in the FCT international
evaluations of 2003, 2008 and 2018.

1
https://adacorsa.automotive.oth-aw.de/index.php
It has graduated 20+ PhDstudents during 2013-2017, who are now in prominent positions in
either academia or industry. CISTER is housed in a 3-storey modern building, entirely used for
CISTER activities. The building includes a dedicated PhD-student level, laboratories, meeting
rooms, library, cafeteria, kitchen, auditoriums, multi-cultural prayer room, etc. The
laboratories feature up-to date technologies covering many safety critical domains
(automotive, avionics, smartcities, building automation, etc.). Over the years, CISTER has
hosted various flagship conferences in the areas of real-time systems, CPS, wireless sensor
networks or factory communication systems.

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