Timothy Arrowsmith: Reconfigurable UAV Control Systems Phase Two

Reconfigurable UAV Control Systems Phase Two James E. Lumpp, Jr. ABSTRACT In this work we propose a continuation of the collaboration between researchers at the University of Kentucky and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Wallops Flight Facility to develop architectures for Autonomous Fault Tolerant UAV control. As part of the collaboration, we will continue to develop techniques for building reconfigurable UAV computer control architectures that will improve reliability and simplify the reconfiguration of UAV platforms. Fault-tolerance is provided by enabling the computer systems to automatically identify hardware and software faults and to adapt the failures during missions. This same capability will allow UAVs to be quickly recontigured on the ground to add or remove processing capability and or sensor payloads. Finally. we propose to extend the aircraft control architecture via wireless links to allow reconfiguration to span comm. Links between aircraft and between aircraft and ground stations. This migration of computation between ground stations and aircraft will allow rapid development and testing ofUA Vs.