The Drone (SUT, PRO) use case focuses on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems that bridge aviation safety principles with autonomous mobility education. Developed through Prodron’s extensive experience in UAV training and system design, this use case explores real-world challenges such as emergency response, navigation under uncertainty, sensor fusion, and communication reliability. The drones operate using open-source frameworks like ArduPilot and QGroundControl, supporting both software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) validation. In the academic context, this use case provides a versatile platform for teaching autonomous flight control, safety verification, and resilience testing, allowing students to apply V&V methodologies from aerial robotics to broader autonomous vehicle domains.
The UAV use-case requirements focus on defining the essential verification and validation conditions for safe and reliable autonomous flight operations. They emphasize emergency response handling, navigation under uncertainty, sensor integration, and communication robustness, including lessons from MAVLink telemetry that can directly apply to V2X communication challenges in automotive systems. These requirements ensure realistic, reproducible, and educationally relevant validation of UAV systems.
- The framework must enable emergency response validation, including fault injection, communication loss recovery, and system redundancy testing. - It should support navigation under uncertainty, allowing for dynamic obstacle avoidance, no-fly zone compliance, and route optimization under changing conditions. - The simulation environment must facilitate sensor integration testing, including GNSS, IMU, and vision-based systems, with modeling of environmental factors such as wind or weather effects. - Communication reliability and latency simulation should be included to evaluate telemetry, interference resilience, and cybersecurity aspects of UAV operations. - The setup must support SIL and HIL configurations, enabling both pure software and mixed real-hardware validation of control and perception modules. - Tools and models should support, where reasonable, a dual-tier approach, combining solutions with open-source frameworks for advanced experimentation.
The UAV V&V requirements ensure comprehensive testing of autonomous flight systems under realistic and variable conditions, supporting both educational and research-oriented objectives. By integrating open-source simulation, communication reliability testing, and hardware-in-the-loop validation, they provide a robust foundation for safety assurance and hands-on learning. The SafeAV study recommends a dual-tier approach for UAV simulation and validation—combining commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems for rapid onboarding with open-source ecosystems for advanced, research-driven experimentation. This structure enables both immediate applicability in training contexts and long-term scalability for integration into academic courses, laboratories, and testbeds.