A New Hierarchical Software Architecture Towards Safety-Critical Aspects of a Drone System
This work addresses safety and reliability issues for drone systems, particularly in critical applications, but is incremental as it builds on existing formally verified components like CertiKOS.
The paper tackles the problem of software failures in safety-critical drone systems by proposing a hierarchical architecture that uses formal verification to ensure each module meets its design specifications, resulting in improved reliability during device anomalies.
In this paper, a new hierarchical software architecture is proposed to improve the safety and reliability of a safety-critical drone system from the perspective of its source code. The proposed architecture uses formal verification methods to ensure that the implementation of each module satisfies its expected design specification, so that it prevents a drone from crashing due to unexpected software failures. This study builds on top of a formally verified operating system kernel, certified kit operating system (CertiKOS). Since device drivers are considered the most important parts affecting the safety of the drone system, we focus mainly on verifying bus drivers such as the serial peripheral interface and the inter-integrated circuit drivers in a drone system using a rigorous formal verification method. Experiments have been carried out to demonstrate the improvement in reliability in case of device anomalies.