Holistic IJTAG-based External and Internal Fault Monitoring in UAVs

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), use System-on-Chip (SoC) based computing platforms to perform multiple complex tasks in safety-critical applications that require a highly dependable operation. Due to continuous technological manufacturing miniaturization SoCs face a wide spectrum of chip-level reliability issues such as aging, soft and hard errors during the operational lifetime of a UAV. In addition, external (off-chip) faults in the sensors, actuators, and motors are another cause of UAV failures. While existing works examine either on-chip faults (internal) or sensors/actuators faults (external) separately, this research proposes a UAV health monitoring infrastructure considering both external and internal faults holistically. The proposed method relies on the IEEE 1687 standard (IJTAG) and employs on-chip embedded instruments as health monitors to instantly access external and internal sensor data. Experimental results for functional simulation of a real-life case-study design demonstrate both types of fault detection by serving only three clock cycles and the localization process using 16 and 30 clock cycles for the case of single and double faults, respectively.