UAV Software Development

UAV applications offer great opportunities for providing cost-effective solutions for diverse applications that require different capabilities for the various tasks involved. Therefore, the demand for UAV civil applications is increasing significantly along with the growth of the UAV market. Forecast International predicts strong growth in the UAV industry. To that point, many countries around the world lack the capabilities and funding to either procure or manufacture these large and complex systems. However, countries such as India and Brazil are forming partnerships to help build these capabilities. UAVs became important tools nowadays to perform many tasks, building applications that will effectively and efficiently operate UAVs and utilize them for a certain problem still requires a huge number of man hours in design, development, testing and deployment. This is mainly due to the lack of existing technologies and management methodologies that can be utilized to effectively develop UAV applications. This growth requires efficient and cost-effective development processes while UAV applications can be considered as complex systems which creates several challenges for the UAV applications development at different stages. Several technical and non-technical challenges that face their development processes need to be solved. Many project management and technical challenges face UAV applications development in terms of resource management, power management, security, communication and other challenges related to testing, simulation and regulations as well. Furthermore, how to integrate these components into a final UAV application product is also a challenge.

UAV applications development projects are considered complex projects due to the development stages and the components integration systems. Developing UAV applications involves integrating hardware, software, sensors, actuators, communication components and eventually command and control platforms with the UAV mechanical systems.

To address these issues we need to understand what UAV applications are and what the issues related to project management that may affect the development of UAV applications are. UAVs have a wide range of applications and models. They are divided into categories, which are safety control, scientific research, security, commercial and military applications. However to achieve a well-designed UAV application, there must be accurate information support, which is necessary for a successful system. It is well known that commercial UAV applications have become involved in many industries ranging from agriculture to oil and gas production and transport. The architecture of a typical UAV application consists of several main components comprising of the control system, the monitoring system, the data processing system, and the landing system. The internal system provides a wide range of functions ranging from navigation to providing data transfer to ground stations or other UAVs as well as integration with AI, operational systems as well as command and control systems. UAVs are involved in new activities and in solving new problems every day. To date, some of the inhibiting factors for using UAVs in many civilian applications include the cost of acquiring these devices, building the required applications, and the operating systems. They have the flexibility to perform difficult tasks, support high resolution imagery and cover large and remote areas. On the other hand, a device with such abilities results in ethical and legal implications. Most countries have privacy as well as data protection acts and laws.

However, to date, most UAV applications are mainly deployed in the military and security fields. Generally, the issues that were raised were the concept of operation, safety, privacy and ethics. This has resulted in some people having a limited view of this technology. The image of UAVs is changing due to its use in civil applications. For example, in Nepal, UAVs are involved in wildlife protection. The non-governmental organization (NGO) involved in the project, trained the guards on how to use UAVs to protect wildlife. Another example is how NGOs in Japan use UAVs to monitor illegal Japanese whaling in the southern hemisphere. That is what gave research and technical communities some insight to the possible use of UAVs.

In Summary, UAV application development project consists of many processes and components. We consider things such as payload, engines, avionics, software development, integration and testing. Sound and effective project management methods involving system dynamics, program evaluation, review techniques, critical path analysis, design structure matrixes, the earned value method, Gantt charts and object process methodologies are necessary.