End-to-end Analysis and Design of a Drone Flight Controller

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis and design framework for drone flight controllers, focusing on end-to-end timing guarantees to ensure reliable drone operation, demonstrated through porting and testing on a real hardware platform.

Contribution

It introduces a composable pipe model for analyzing end-to-end timing in drone controllers and provides a mathematical framework for designing task periods that meet timing and schedulability constraints.

Findings

Achieved end-to-end latency within predicted bounds

Successfully ported Cleanflight to Quest RTOS on Intel Aero

Validated analysis with real-world experiments

Abstract

Timing guarantees are crucial to cyber-physical applications that must bound the end-to-end delay between sensing, processing and actuation. For example, in a flight controller for a multirotor drone, the data from a gyro or inertial sensor must be gathered and processed to determine the attitude of the aircraft. Sensor data fusion is followed by control decisions that adjust the flight of a drone by altering motor speeds. If the processing pipeline between sensor input and actuation is not bounded, the drone will lose control and possibly fail to maintain flight. Motivated by the implementation of a multithreaded drone flight controller on the Quest RTOS, we develop a composable pipe model based on the system's task, scheduling and communication abstractions. This pipe model is used to analyze two semantics of end-to-end time: reaction time and freshness time. We also argue that end-to-end timing properties should be factored in at the early stage of application design. Thus, we provide a mathematical framework to derive feasible task periods that satisfy both a given set of end-to-end timing constraints and the schedulability requirement. We demonstrate the applicability of our design approach by using it to port the Cleanflight flight controller firmware to Quest on the Intel Aero board. Experiments show that Cleanflight ported to Quest is able to achieve end-to-end latencies within the predicted time bounds derived by analysis.