Abstract:

The flight control computer (FCC) of high performance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) must meet the increased safety and reliability requirements, and redundancy and fault tolerance are essential elements to improve the reliability and availability. The flight control system requirements, such as safety, reliability, maintainability, and real-time response, are studied, Then, compared among civil and military aircraft and UAV, the architectures and redundancy management of typical fault-tolerant FCC systems are introduced. Next, the particularity and future developments of FCC for UAV are addressed, and a triple modular redundancy (TMR) FCC system for UAV is developed. The TMR is a distributed system based on the FlexRay bus, and FlexRay is not only the backplane bus for the single FCC but also the system bus for the TMR system. The TMR system is Byzantine resilience, and meets the highreliability flexibility, scalability and low cost requirements of UAVs.