Titulo Estágio
Fault Injector Tool for UAVs’ Safety Risk Assessment
Áreas de especialidade
Engenharia de Software
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
DEI-CISUC
Enquadramento
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), in particular drones, have gained significant importance in diverse sectors. Recently, there is a clear trend for the growing use of drones in civilian services as well. However, there is still a long way to go before drones are capable enough to be safely used without human surveillance. Thus, for building autonomous drones, it is fundamental to perform a profound safety risk assessment to prevent any possible damage to themselves, the environment, and humans. In this internship, we aim to use fault injection, or more specifically on failure emulation, to quantify the impact of possible failures, supporting the quantitative safety assessment of UAVs. We aim to build an environment providing the necessary components for the definition/configuration of a UAV under assessment and its environment, a mission to be executed, a fault/failure model (related to communication issues, software issues, security attack, or environmental issues), and the fault injection procedure (e.g., start time and end time). It then performs the fault injection campaign, obtains the flight tracks during reference and faulty runs, and shows the effects of the faults injected/failures emulated, providing the users with the necessary information for further analysis. The tool resulting from this work can be used by i) researchers for future related studies; ii) companies developing drones to build safer drones (by evaluating the fault-tolerant techniques in place); and iii) air traffic controllers for building failure mitigation and collision avoidance solutions.
Objetivo
The goal of this work is to build a fault injection tool for UAVs in order to support quantitative safety risk assessment of UAVs and evaluating the fault tolerance techniques in place. To do so, we need to 1) build a representative model of an autonomous UAV system including all necessary components; 2) identify, characterize, and analyze possible failure scenarios in a system with autonomous UAVs; 3) identify the possible and UAV-specific faults (of each component involved in the system (e.g., loss of Wi-Fi) and build a representative fault model; 4) Implement the fault injection tool.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
Work Plan of 1º Semester
[Some tasks might overlap; M=Month]
T1 (M1): Knowledge transfer and state of the art review on UAV systems (in particular drones), software faults, failures (dependable, secure, and safe systems).
T2 (M2-M3): Identifying all components involved in an autonomous UAV and building a representative model of that.
T3 (M4): Identifying possible failure scenarios and creating a fault model for the system previously modeled.
T4 (M5): Writing the Intermediate report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
Work Plan of 2º Semester
[Some tasks might overlap; M=Month]
T5 (M6): Integration of the intermediate defense comments in the work and report.
T6 (M6-M8): Implementation (Improvement and extension of an existing prototype) of fault injection tool.
T7 (M8): Plan the experiments for testing the tool and perform the tests.
T8 (M9): Writing the thesis.
T9 (M10): Write a research paper and submission to a related international conference.
Condições
The selected student will be integrated into 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 workplace and necessary computer resources will be provided. Please contact the advisor for any questions or clarification needed.
Observações
Bolsa de licenciado por 6 meses no valor de 835.98 euros/mês, eventualmente renovável.
Advisors: Naghmeh Ivaki (naghmeh@dei.uc.pt), Henrique Madeira (henrique@dei.uc.pt)
Orientador
Naghmeh Ivaki, Henrique Madeira
naghmeh@dei.uc.pt 📩