Mixed Criticality Communication within an Unmanned Delivery Rotorcraft

There is a substantial market foreseen for autonomous UAVs including the delivery business where a number of startups are beginning to establish themselves [1]. As son as a number of such aircraft inhabit the airspace, autonomous operation with in-flight correction, rather than direct control, is expected to be the operational modus of choice. In the European airspace the SORA (Specific Operations Risk Assessment) process, whilst designed to enable, or at least not to hinder innovation in this market, are explicit on the safety demands on UAVs [2]. As a result, adhering to these specifications comes at considerable cost. Roughly broken down, an autonomous UAV consists of an airframe, propulsion and base station and flight controllers. Whereas airframe and propulsion require a certain co-design/co-specification effort, Figure 1: HORUS Mounted on a small Drone. Two of the three GPS under the SORA regime, at least for aircraft of similar weight antennas are visible. HORUS itself is the small, credit-card sized class, flight controllers for out-of-sight operation can be PCB on the bottom.