A novel distributed architecture for unmanned aircraft systems based on Robot Operating System 2

A novel distributed control architecture for unmanned aircraft system (UASs) based on thenew Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 middleware is proposed, endowed with industrialgradetools that establish a novel standard for high-reliability distributed systems. Thearchitecture has been developed for an autonomous quadcopter to design an inclusivesolution ranging from low-level sensor management and soft real-time operating systemsetup and tuning to perception, exploration, and navigation modules orchestrated by afinite-state machine. The architecture proposed in this study builds on ROS 2 with itsscalability and soft real-time communication functionalities, while including security andsafety features, optimised implementations of localisation algorithms, and integrating aninnovative and flexible path planner for UASs. Finally, experimental results have beencollected during tests carried out both in the laboratory and in a realistic environment,showing the effectiveness of the proposed architecture in terms of reliability, scalability, andflexibility.