Providing accountability and liability protection for UAV operations beyond visual line of sight
Justin Yapp, Remzi Seker, Radu F. Babiceanu · 2018
Current off-the-shelf Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Flight Data Recorders do not address liability and accountability in the event of an accident. This limitation makes it difficult for necessary stakeholders to determine parties at fault, especially when future operations are expected to be conducted Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight (BVLoS). While both on-board and off-board recorders currently exist, the data collected is unsuitable for insurance claims and other legal matters since non-repudiation and tamper-proof mechanisms are not implemented. At the same time, with ongoing developments and improvements to Internet of Things (IoT) telecommunications infrastructure such as LTE-M, 5G, SigFox and NB-IoT protocols, usage of TCP/IP channels and cloud services for UAV Command and Control systems is increasing. This research proposes a real-time, off-board flight logging service using a secure graph database scheme for storage and analysis of flight data recordings. By representing series of logs as an encrypted block chain in graph nodes of a database, it is possible to construct accurate time-lines and enable non-repudiation of operator-UAV and UAV-UAV interactions that provide irrefutable evidence. For proof of concept, this design integrates into the UAV as a Service architecture for BVLOS operations we have proposed in previous publications. The details of the recording protocol, integration into the UAV as a Service platform, data generation simulation and performance results are discussed.