Titulo Estágio
Failure Analysis in a Swarm of Autonomous Quadrotors
Áreas de especialidade
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
DEI-FCTUC
Enquadramento
Research interest in small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), particularly quadrotors, is growing rapidly due to their wide range of applications and their potential to perform tasks that are costly to be performed by humans or threat humans’ safety. Quadrotors have four rotors that make them very agile in attaining the full range of motion (capability of hovering, horizontal flight, and vertical take-off and landing). Despite their flying ability, quadcopters are too small for many tasks and have a very low battery life (due to the extra motors they carry). For this reason, in many applications a group of collaborative autonomous quadcopters will be needed to accomplish a mission. In these applications, safety is one of the top concerns. Ensuring safety of a system including a swarm of autonomous quadrotors is everything but simple, because it consists of several potentially dangerous (e.g., high-speed motors and propellers), and faulty components (software and hardware).
Objetivo
The goal of this work is to identify, characterize, and analyze possible failure scenarios in the system with a swarm of autonomous quadrotors. To this end, we will need to 1) build a model of the system including all necessary components; 2) identify the possible faults and crash modes of each component involved in the model (e.g., loss of Wi-Fi); 3) identify the causes of the crashes that may occur in each component (e.g., loss of signal due to interference); 4) identify the failures that may occur due to the faults and crashes (e.g., loss of control in quadrotors); 5) identify the possible solutions for tolerating the crashes and faults (e.g., use a secondary communication channel); 6) identify the faults to be injected or the ways the crashes should be emulated for testing purposes (e.g., use tcpkill to emulate connection crashes). In practice, the expected outcomes of this includes writing a research paper to be submitted to a related international conference.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
[Some tasks might overlap; M=Month]
T1 (M1): Knowledge transfer and state of the art review on faults and failure analysis.
T2 (M2-M3): Identifying all components involved and building the model of the system.
T3 (M4): Identifying possible failure scenarios in the model previously created.
T4 (M5): Writing the Intermediate report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
[Some tasks might overlap; M=Month]
T5 (M6): Integration of the intermediate defense comments in the work and report.
T6 (M6-M7): Identifying the crash modes of all components involved and the failures that may occur due to each crash.
T7 (M8): Identifying possible solutions to tolerate the crashes.
T8 (M8): Identifying the faults to be injected or the ways the crashes should be emulated.
T9 (M9): Writing the thesis.
T10 (M10): Write a research paper and submission to a related international conference.
Condições
The selected student will be integrated in the Software and Systems Engineering group of CISUC and the work will be carried out in the facilities of the Department of Informatics Engineering at the University of Coimbra (CISUC - Software and Systems Engineering Group), where a work place and necessary computer resources will be provided.
Observações
Please contact the advisor for any question or clarification needed.
The work will be co-advised by Naghmeh Ramezani Ivaki (naghmeh@dei.uc.pt) from SSE-CISUC
Orientador
Henrique Madeira
henrique@dei.uc.pt 📩