End-to-end Analysis and Design of a Drone Flight Controller
Zhuoqun Cheng, Richard West, Craig Einstein

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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsReal-Time Systems Scheduling · Distributed systems and fault tolerance · Embedded Systems Design Techniques
