Abstract

UAVs are multifaceted devices that have enormous versatility and flexibility in a plethora of various fields. Year over year, UAVs see a tremendous amount of research invested in it to make them more efficient and autonomous when performing a task. This increase in autonomy requires the UAVs to have a dependable link between them to exchange crucial information like current position and speed. These messages are transmitted to avoid collisions and perform missions efficiently. The communication between UAVs depends on several factors like the used telemetry device, distance between the UAVs, speed of the UAVs, and application environment. Hence, an UAV designer must analyze the reliability of the communication based on the desired application environment and necessary communication components in the UAV.
Faults can also propagate in UAV components built using the FPGA technology when they are placed in harsh radiation environments like radiation monitoring. These errors can lead to complications in the operation of an UAV communication component, and hence, FPGAs require techniques like blind scrubbing to mitigate these faults. The availability of the communication component can be impacted when using this mitigation approach. Therefore, investigating the optimal configuration to maintain high and consistent availability is crucial.

This thesis presents a methodology to perform high-level dependability analysis for UAV communication protocols using statistical model checking. First, we evaluate the reliability of a point-to-point UAV communication using the UAV-UAV framework. The main objective of this framework is to investigate the link reliability between UAVs based on the specifications of the telemetry device and the availability of the communication components. To accomplish this, we propose models to emulate the behavior of two UAVs in air, the condition of the transmitter and receiver, and the data exchange phase between two UAVs. Then, we analyze the availability of an UAV communication module in a harsh radiation environment using blind scrubbing as a mitigation approach. The peak availability of UAV-UAV and UAV-GCS communication components is investigated through the UAV-UAV and UAV-GCS frameworks. The two frameworks utilize the SEU rate computed from the RTL code of the communication component design. Then, implement crucial features like scrubbing interval and scrub time in the transmitter and receiver modules to find the optimal scrubbing interval when the UAV communications with other UAVs or the GCS. Finally, the effect of these faults and limitations of blind scrubbing is also investigated in our work.