FlyOS: rethinking integrated modular avionics for autonomous multicopters

Abstract

Autonomous multicopters often feature federated architectures, which incur relatively high communication costs between separate hardware components. These costs limit the ability to react quickly to new mission objectives. Additionally, federated architectures are not easily upgraded without introducing new hardware that impacts size, weight, power and cost constraints. In turn, such constraints restrict the use of redundant hardware to handle faults. In response to these challenges, we propose FlyOS, an Integrated Modular Avionics approach to consolidate mixed-criticality flight functions in software on heterogeneous multicore aerial platforms. FlyOS is based on a separation kernel that statically partitions resources among virtualized sandboxed OSes. We present a dual-sandbox prototype configuration, where timing- and safety-critical flight control tasks execute in a real-time OS alongside mission-critical vision-based navigation tasks in a Linux sandbox. Low latency shared memory communication allows flight commands and data to be relayed in real-time between sandboxes. A hypervisor-based fault-tolerance mechanism is also deployed to ensure failover flight control in case of critical function or timing failures. We validate FlyOS’s performance and showcase its benefits when compared against traditional architectures in terms of predictable, extensible and efficient flight control.