Stream Runtime Monitoring on UAS

TL;DR

This paper discusses implementing stream runtime monitoring on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) to enhance system safety, debugging, and health management, based on practical experience with specification, instrumentation, and online monitoring.

Contribution

It presents practical insights and improvements in stream runtime monitoring techniques applied to UAS, including specification, implementation, and usability enhancements.

Findings

Monitoring improved system debugging and health management.

Usability and language design of specifications were enhanced.

Practical experience demonstrated benefits for system safety and reliability.

Abstract

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) with autonomous decision-making capabilities are of increasing interest for a wide area of applications such as logistics and disaster recovery. In order to ensure the correct behavior of the system and to recognize hazardous situations or system faults, we applied stream runtime monitoring techniques within the DLR ARTIS (Autonomous Research Testbed for Intelligent System) family of unmanned aircraft. We present our experience from specification elicitation, instrumentation, offline log-file analysis, and online monitoring on the flight computer on a test rig. The debugging and health management support through stream runtime monitoring techniques have proven highly beneficial for system design and development. At the same time, the project has identified usability improvements to the specification language, and has influenced the design of the language.