Dronology: An Incubator for Cyber-Physical System Research

TL;DR

Dronology introduces a CPS research incubator for managing small UAS, providing a versatile environment for experimentation, simulation, and evaluation to advance research in safety-critical cyber-physical systems.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel research incubator platform for CPS, enabling high-fidelity simulation and physical deployment of sUAS, fostering community collaboration and research innovation.

Findings

Broad support from software engineering community

Successful integration of simulation and physical sUAS

Potential to accelerate CPS research and safety assurance

Abstract

Research in the area of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is hampered by the lack of available project environments in which to explore open challenges and to propose and rigorously evaluate solutions. In this "New Ideas and Emerging Results" paper we introduce a CPS research incubator -- based upon a system, and its associated project environment, for managing and coordinating the flight of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS). The research incubator provides a new community resource, making available diverse, high-quality project artifacts produced across multiple releases of a safety-critical CPS. It enables researchers to experiment with their own novel solutions within a fully-executable runtime environment that supports both high-fidelity sUAS simulations as well as physical sUAS. Early collaborators from the software engineering community have shown broad and enthusiastic support for the project and its role as a research incubator, and have indicated their intention to leverage the environment to address their own research areas of goal modeling, runtime adaptation, safety-assurance, and software evolution.