Drone Software System

Drone Software System

Software

There are three or maybe four categories of software that we’d use on the drone system:

1. Firmware components: Many of the HW components (devices) that we put on a system today are not just passive hardware components; they have associated firmware that can help offload certain activities without requiring the CPU’s attention.

2. OS and drivers: Typically, in an OS-based environment, to maintain the coherency of device usage and establish a level of security, the SW is divided into system and application domains. Different OSes use different terminologies for the same: system and application domains. This separation typically uses the protection and separation mechanism provided by hardware. And different SOC architectures implement and/or.

provide different ways for protection and separation. Broadly speaking, there are two parts to the system part of the software:

a) . The controllers’ and devices’ drivers, which provide access to the hardware and serialize the access requests from different SW components.

b) . The other part is the overall management of resources (devices/ controllers, processor, and memory), and scheduling, etc. It also provides infrastructure for communication across various beings (hardware and software) on the system. This part is commonly referred as the operating system (OS). Given the nature of the usages, drones need to use a real-time operating system (RTOS). 

RTOS is a category of operating systems that provide a mechanism to guarantee higher bound to a process completion.

3. Sensing, navigation, and control: With drones being UAVs, sensing, navigation, and control are of the utmost importance. The first piece of this crucial part is the sensing infrastructure, which feeds the navigation system, which triggers control decisions.

4. Application-specific components: In addition to the first three fundamental components, there are likely to be some application-specific components (both software and hardware). For illustration, taking the example of the surveillance drone, there will be image capture, processing, and transmit-related components on the system. The application-specific components make use of the “OS and driver” piece in order to accomplish the goal.

Figure 1-5 shows the logical view of the software components of a 

typical drone system, as just discussed.

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Figure 1-5. Logical view of the drone software stack



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