Integration of UAVS with Real Time Operating Systems and Establishing a Secure Data Transmission

Abstract

In today’s world, the applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are leaping by extending their scope from military applications on to commercial and medical sectors as well. Owing to this commercialization, the need to append external hardware with UAV systems becomes inevitable. This external hardware could aid in enabling wireless data transfer between the UAV system and remote Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) using low powered architecture like Thread, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). The data is being transmitted from the flight controller to the ground control station using a MAVlink (Micro Air Vehicle Link) protocol. But this radio transmission method is not secure, which may lead to data leakage problems. The ideal aim of this research is to address the issues of integrating different hardware with the flight controller of the UAV system using a light-weight protocol called UAVCAN (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Controller Area Network). This would result in reduced wiring and would harness the problem of integrating multiple systems to UAV. At the same time, data security is addressed by deploying an encryption chip into the UAV system to encrypt the data transfer using ECC (Elliptic curve cryptography) and transmitting it to cloud platforms instead of radio transmission.