Towards an Architecture for Customizable Drones

Drones/UAVs are able to carry out air operations which are difficult to be performed by manned aircrafts. In addition, their use brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits, while reducing risks to human life. However, current generation of embedded drone architectures consist of loosely coupled sub-systems that run in dedicated monolithic platforms. Therefore, this approach reaches its limits when the demand of autonomy increases and when the weight, volume, and power consumption of the dedicated sub-systems encounter the drone restrictions. To overcome these limitations, we, in this paper, propose a modular architectural approach inspired from the very famous three-layered architecture within the mobile robots' domain. Our architecture separates the different system's concerns into three layers: control, flight management, and planning. Thus, each architecture layer can be evolved/customized separately without affecting the other layers. To ensure the applicability of our architecture, we have applied it to a drone system used for a rescue scenario.