A Distributed Avionics Package for Small UAVs
Jack S. Elston, Brian Argrow, Eric W. Frew · Infotech@Aerospace · 2005
This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed computing architec-ture used to accommodate a wide range of operational environments. The architecture’s advantages include fault-tolerance and redundancy through an abstracted high and low-level bus protocol, and significant system scaling enabled by its modular nature. The current implementation was created for use in an avionics context, where it accommodates many payload sizes, levels of complexity, and configurations. Each of these advantages are evident in one of the many RECUV (Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles at the University of Colorado) sponsored projects that use this system. This paper will describe some of these projects and how each maintains very different system requirements, ranging from providing a full-featured avionics system, to enabling control of a micro-UAV. I.