Software Health Management for Unmanned Aerial Systems

For unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to be successfully de-ployed and integrated within the national airspace, it is im-perative that they possess the capability to effectively com-plete their missions without compromising the safety of other aircraft, as well as persons and property on the ground. This necessity creates a natural requirement for UAS that can re-spond to uncertain environmental conditions and emergent failures in real-time, with robustness and resilience close en-ough to those of manned systems. We introduce a system that meets this requirement with the design of a real-time on-board system health management (SHM) capability to con-tinuously monitor sensors, software, and hardware compo-nents. This system can detect and diagnose failures and vi-olations of safety or performance rules during the flight of