jUAV: A Java Based System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Paparazzi UAV is one of the most popular open-source Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platforms in use today. The code base of Paparazzi UAV has served as the basis for both C and Java open-source benchmarks for real-time embedded systems. These benchmarks, PapaBench and jPapaBench, have been widely accepted by their respective communities as they provide a representative and complex workload. However PapaBench and jPapaBench do not utilize a functional simulation in their execution, but rather focus on testing the contention between tasks. In this paper, we first detail our attempt at adapting jPapaBench to utilize the New Paparazzi Simulator (NPS) developed by the Paparazzi UAV team, which provides the underlying sensor models and allows for the use of different Flight Dynamic Models (FDM), which simulate actual environmental influence on the airframe [1]. We then compare jPapaBench performance to its C-based inspiration, Paparazzi UAV. Our results show that jPapaBench is quite different in implementation and performance from Paparazzi UAV. Following this finding, we target a more direct port of Paparazzi UAV to Java named jUAV using a one-component-at-a-time approach, allowing for each component to be validated in isolation for correctness. The paper then compares the correctness of the initial prototype of jUAV consisting of a subset of the Paparazzi UAV code implemented in Java. We believe that jUAV will be greatly beneficial to the real-time Java community since it will provide a means for benchmarking a real-time Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with representative real-world workloads and allowing for an open-source solution used for flying airframes using real-time Java.