Multi-Disciplinary Cyber-Physical Optimization for Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Future small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) will require careful co-design over both physical and cyber elements to maximize total-system efficiency. Mission objectives and success of the system as a whole are becoming increasingly dependent on appropriate allocation of computational resources balanced against demands of the physical actuation systems. In this paper we describe a co-optimization scheme considering tradeoffs between costs associated with physical actuation effort required for control and computational effort required to acquire and process incoming information. A small UAS surveillance mission, visual inspection of a pipeline, is proposed to investigate specifics of cyber-physical cost terms and their tradeoffs. A multi-disciplinary cost function minimizes energy and maximize mission efficiency and effectiveness. We examine Pareto fronts over combinations of competing cyber and physical objectives and demonstrate that excluding either cyber or physical cost terms results in reduced performance for the holistic system over the course of the mission.