Drone-based service and product innovation is curtailed by the growing dependence on poorly interoperable proprietary technologies as well as by the risks posed to people on the ground, to other vehicles and to property (e.g., critical infrastructure). The aim of COMP4DRONES is to provide a framework of key enabling technologies for safe and autonomous drones. In this paper, we discuss the different technical contributions of the COMP4DRONES project to create this framework. These contributions support (1) efficient customization and incremental assurance of drone-embedded platforms, (2) safe autonomous decision making concerning individual or cooperative missions, (3) trustworthy drone-to-drone and drone-to- ground communications even in presence of malicious attackers and under the intrinsic platform constraints, (4) agile and cost-effective design and assurance of drone modules and systems, and (5) sustainable impact and creation of an industry-driven community. In addition, lead applications driving ecosystem development and benchmarking on the fields of transport, inspection, logistic and agriculture are developed.

This Paper presents the achievements of the COMP4DRONES project [1]. It aims to raise awareness of the potential for future mobility and logistics applications by integrating drones in the Intelligent Transport Systems. This paper presents the outcomes of this European project that has developed key technologies to deploy innovative drone-based services. It is presented the results of two use-cases where different transport and mobility stakeholders have included drones in their operations to validate the COMP4DRONES framework as well as the key technologies to enable the use of drones in the mobility and the transport sector.

Drones can perform air operations that are hard to be executed using manned aircrafts. The usage of drones in different domains brings significant environmental benefits and economic savings while decreasing risks to human life. Recently, a number of approaches have been introduced to support the development of drone software systems. However, developing customized drone software based on end-user needs is still a time consuming process. Such delay in software production does not match end-users expectations. Therefore, in the COMP4DRONES project (C4D, for short), we propose an agile-development process that is based on reuse to shorten the drone software development. In this process, based on the user requirements, a number of reusable components are selected from a repository that matches the user requirements. These components are then integrated to have a fully functioning drone system. This repository will be filled with reusable components that are being developed during the C4D project (i.e. the key enabling technologies for drones).

Drones/UAVs can be used to perform missions that are very tedious or dangerous for humans. Such drones are the air segment of an unmanned aerial system (UAS), where the UAS also includes a ground segment to control and supervise the drones. Furthermore, the ground and air segments interact with external services that support the missions’ execution. Recently, a number of UAS architectures has been proposed. However, these architectures do not consider all features (functions) of the system and their interactions, which hinders the development of the drone system. Therefore, in this paper, we identify the different functions/blocks of the UAS and their interaction patterns to ease the system’s development tasks. The building blocks include functions for flying a drone, enabling safe and efficient drone flight, managing a drone mission, and their support (e.g., communication, perception, etc.).

Drones/UAVs are able to carry out air operations which are difficult to be performed by manned aircrafts. In addition, their use brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits, while reducing risks to human life. However, current generation of embedded drone architectures consist of loosely coupled sub-systems that run in dedicated monolithic platforms. Therefore, this approach reaches its limits when the demand of autonomy increases and when the weight, volume, and power consumption of the dedicated sub-systems encounter the drone restrictions. To overcome these limitations, we, in this paper, propose a modular architectural approach inspired from the very famous three-layered architecture within the mobile robots' domain. Our architecture separates the different system's concerns into three layers: control, flight management, and planning. Thus, each architecture layer can be evolved/customized separately without affecting the other layers. To ensure the applicability of our architecture, we have applied it to a drone system used for a rescue scenario.

The idea of having drones into the national airspace raises serious concerns. These concerns are for nearly all spectrum of society which ranges from government facilities and aviation authorities to private citizens. To guarantee a high level of safety and security, drones must be implemented as highly constrained systems with a certain number of functions (technologies). In this paper, we identify the key technologies for drones based on their common and specific usages. These technologies are grouped into four categories: U-space capabilities, system functions, payloads, and tools. We also list the contributions of COMP4DRONES project in terms of improving technologies and easing drone customization including its safe operations.

Technological advances make it possible to produce increasingly complex electronic components. Nevertheless, these advances are convoyed by an increasing sensitivity to operating conditions and an accelerated aging process. In safety critical applications, it is vital to provide solutions to avoid these limitations and to guarantee a high level of reliability. In most of the existing methods in the literature only Single Event Upsets (SEU) are assumed. The next generations of embedded systems must on one side support Multiple-Bit Upsets (MBU) and avoid to induce a significant memory and processing overheads on the other side. This paper proposes a new method to increase the reliability of SRAM, without dramatically increasing costs in memory space and processing time. Our method, named DPSR for Double Parity Single Redundancy, offers a high level of reliability and takes into fault patterns occurring in real conditions.

The potential applications for drones, especially those in manned areas or into non-segregated airspace, are currently not possible without the development and validation of certain key enabling technologies: "detect and avoid", "air traffic management" and "command and control (C2) link". SESAR JU identified that issue has a high impact on European innovation, which demands R&D investments and incentives for the convergence of shared technologies and markets. The COMP4DRONES project complements SESAR JU efforts with a particular focus on safe software and hardware drone architectures. COMP4DRONES will bear a holistically designed ecosystem ranging from application to electronic components. The ecosystem aims at supporting (1) efficient customization and incremental assurance of drone-embedded platforms, (2) safe autonomous decision making concerning individual or cooperative missions, (3) trustworthy drone-to-drone and drone-to-ground communications even in presence of malicious attackers and under the intrinsic platform constraints, and (4) agile and cost-effective design and assurance of drone modules and systems. Lead applications driving ecosystem development and benchmarking on the fields of transport, inspection, logistic, precision agriculture, parcel delivery, among others, will be produced.

The embedded systems industry is moving towards the integration of higher performance, yet less reliable electronic components into new product generations. Technology and voltage scaling increased dramatically the susceptibility of new devices not only to Single Bit Upsets (SBU), but also to Multiple Bit Upsets (MBU). However, the system reliability assessment at the design phase of fault-tolerant computer systems is a complex and critical task. In this context, it is mandatory to enhance reliability analysis and evaluation techniques at early-stage of the system development. In this paper, we present a technique for reliability evaluation of embedded systems at early-stage by taking into account the application behavior and SBU/MBU phenomena. Instead of using the random fault injection, our approach models the architecture behavior under real working conditions. Our results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed fault injection simulation platform for early-stage reliability studies.

It is largely recognized that the architectures of embedded systems are becoming more and more complex both at hardware and software levels. Despite the significant advances in the development tools, developing the software of such systems while ensuring their safety is still a difficult task. In this paper, we propose an engineering methodology to ease the development of safe software systems. It consists of four main phases: system modelling and validation, code generation and integration, static code analysis, and dynamic code analysis. This methodology is realized using CEA LIST open-source development platforms: Papyrus, Frama-C, and UNISIM-VP. These platforms are results of many research and industrial projects such as FP7-SafeAdapt, FUI-EQUITAS, FP7-STANCE, CATRENE-OpenES, and FSN-SESAM Grids.

The new AutoSAR adaptive platform makes mixed-critical automotive systems able to adapt at runtime in response to hardware and software failures. However, mapping functions of these adaptive automotive systems to the hardware nodes and reserving their bandwidth are still major challenges. To tackle such major challenges, in this paper, we propose a model-based approach for the automatic identification of functions mapping and bandwidth reservation for the different configurations of an adaptive software system. The functions mapping and bandwidth reservation are performed by a Tabu search-based strategy. In this strategy, there is a temporal isolation between critical and non-critical functions. Thus, overruns of non-critical functions do not affect timing guarantees of critical functions, and the quality of service for the non-critical functions is maximized.

Adaptive embedded software systems have the ability to adapt themselves in response to hardware/software failures at runtime. However, ensuring safe adaptive behaviors of these systems is a major challenge. In this paper, we propose an approach to facilitate the validation of such adaptive behaviors. To do so, an architecture description language for automotive embedded systems (EAST-ADL) is used for designing the software. The system design model is then used for generating the embedded software. To ensure that the system behaves correctly at runtime, its adaptive behavior is analyzed using fault injection and monitoring techniques on a virtual platform. This work is part of the European project SafeAdapt, which provides a novel architecture for adaptive systems in the automotive domain. It also describes a particular aspect, virtual validation, in the evolution of the EQUITAS project.

Embedded systems are becoming ubiquitous and are subject to demanding standards in both safety and reliability. Modern vehicles, which must respect ISO 26262 standards, use up to 100 Electronic Control Unit (ECUs). Advances in microelectronics enable integration of more functions in the ECU, but at the cost of greater unreliability in hostile operating environments, such as electromagnetic fields, temperature, and humidity. Their software mainly drives embedded system flexibility and smartness. However due to lack of automation, its validation and verification (V&V) takes place throughout the design process and tends to swallow up 40% to 50% of the total development cost. The “Enhanced Quality Using Intensive Test Analysis on Simulators” (EQUITAS) project intends to limit the impact of software V&V on embedded systems cost and time-to-market while improving reliability and functional safety. Project activities include: development of a continuous tool-chain to automate the V&V process of embedded computers, improving the relevance of the test campaigns by detecting the redundant tests using equivalence classes, providing assistance for hardware failure effect analysis (FMEA), and finally assessing the tool-chain under the ISO 26262 requirements.