A Distributed Flight Control System Architecture for Small UAVs

The current practice for designing a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight control system is to use a traditional centralized processing architecture. Because of its characteristic lack of modularity, this type of architecture does not satisfy the need for frequent upgrades, replacements, and redesigns of vehicles and their subsystems in the most time-and-cost-effective manner. This thesis explores the potential of a data busbased, distributed processing architecture, to better meet that need. A hypothetical centralized architecture is generated representing a current practice baseline for small UAV architectures. The benefits of utilizing a distributed architecture for the small UAV flight control system are analyzed, and some design methods and relevant technologies are discussed. Specifically, two distributed flight control system architectures are presented: a LONWorks (Local Operating Network) control bus architecture and a Universal Serial Bus (USB) high performance serial bus architecture. To demonstrate the relative advantages of the distributed approach, a set of metrics is used to compare the costs of altering the centralized architecture and the USB architecture, when the specific system must be redesigned or the system must be expanded with an additional flight control sensor. Technical Supervisor: Dr. David S. Kang Title: Project Manager, Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Thesis Advisor: Dr. John J. Deyst, Jr. Title: Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics