Reliable FPGA-based Architectures for Quadcopters in Search and Rescue Missions

This paper focuses on Quadcopters in the context of Search and Rescue missions. Two different environments are studied, namely a very harsh one and a moderately harsh one. The fault set includes Single Event Upsets (SEUs), hard failures and total chip failures. The hardware platform used is based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). For each environment, a fault-tolerant architecture is developed taking into account system reliability, power consumption and system weight. Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) is utilized. Continuous Time Markov Chains are used to estimate reliability. The increase in reliability (compared to a similar non-fault-tolerant system) is considerable in both environments. The DPR function is successfully tested on a Xilinx xc7z010clg400-1.