Towards a Service-Oriented U-Space Architecture for Autonomous Drone Operations

Abstract

Verbatim from Semantic Scholar. Not paraphrased, not summarized.

While the complexity of development and cost of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) decrease, the use and market of UASs continuously increase. The benefits of UASs can however only be fully realized when they are allowed to autonomously fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS). To allow safe and efficient autonomous BVLOS flights, the European initiative SESAR came out with the concept of U -space to integrate UASs into the already populated airspace. There is however currently no open high-level software architecture that realizes the concept of U -space for autonomous BVLOS operations. In this work, we present an initial proposal of such a system, a service-oriented architecture named ROS-DOTS. We follow a modular design that supports the integration of services that can be modified and replaced independently. The benefit of our modular design is the use of high-level abstraction models for UAS operations, using modular services that are developed independently between each other. To show the potential of ROS-DOTS, we present a use case where several services in the architecture and a commercial UAS traffic management system work together to generate a flight plan for a UAS operation, that then can be retrieved from our system and unloaded into a UAS.

Authors

• Miguel Campusano
• Kjeld Jensen
• U. Schultz

Keywords

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Environmental Science