Fast and Secure Mission Description, Validation and Deployment for Safety-Critical Operations
Anton Dimov Hristozov · 2024
The correct execution of missions is considered crucial in many industries. This is especially true in the military and homeland security sectors. The creation of missions quickly and generically is a challenging task. As many vehicles are controlled from ground control stations or through special mission applications that are in the air or in motion on the ground, the ability to describe all aspects of the mission and deploy it efficiently is a great plus when operating safety-critical systems. Unfortunately, comprehensive solutions for defining missions are rare and are not universal to be practical. This paper presents a mission description language and approach that covers all essential aspects of missions pertinent to UAVs and UGVs. This work presents a methodology for mission validation and deployment that can speed up and validate missions that are modified frequently and even during the execution of the current mission. Developing such mission description language follows formal grammar and implementation through parser generation tools. The language structure allows for creating tools to generate code for mission applications based on established messaging protocols such as Mavlink. This facilitates the generation of missions by users who understand the system but not necessarily all implementation aspects of the UAV and UGV software.