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Triple redundancy autopilot three boards two GPS launched by Micropilot

Posted by Gary Mortimer on February 16, 2011 at 11:30pm

micropilotautopilot.jpg

MicroPilot 21283X

How long before this becomes a standard required by authorities??

 

The MP21283X, MicroPilot’s triple-redundancy (3X) autopilot, is now available. Although 3X technology is established within the aviation industry, 3X autopilots are a new addition to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The MP21283x contains three robust autopilots to overcome a multitude of hardware failures. If any one of the three autopilots should fail, the remaining two take over. An additional mechanism oversees these three systems.

 

http://www.suasnews.com/2011/02/3797/micropilot-launches-the-first-commercially-available-triple-redundancy-uav-autopilot/

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Comments

  • DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner February 17, 2011 at 2:44am

    @ MartinT

     

    I'll PM you!

  • DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner February 17, 2011 at 2:20am

    @MartinT

     

    Hi Martin,

    Well generally, computers, networking etc seems to work ok on a two system backup, so I can't see why this wouldn't. I would imagine that the vast vast majority of APM failures would result in a total failure, as opposed to a partial failure, so monitoring the outputs would be a start?

  • DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner February 17, 2011 at 2:18am
    Oh that sounds very clever and techie! I was thinking more along the lines of two APMs with a heartbeat. "Are you there? Yeah, are you? Yeah" kind of thing. Or possibly by doing it through monitoring the PWM outputs and if they don't look right, failing over. Of course you have to make that piece of hardware redundant also!
  • Mike Bakula February 17, 2011 at 2:11am
    Funny, this is what I'm working on right now for a paper at the AUVSI conference this summer.  So far, the key issue is how to avoid the integral term in the PID loops from going off-scale (winding up) on the APs that don't have control.  I'm in the middle of adapting the HIL setup for multiple APs and error injection to see how bad a problem it is.  Sidestepping the creation of new single points of failure is also an issue, but I'll talk about that more in my paper...
  • Developer
    John Arne Birkeland February 17, 2011 at 1:29am
    I understand the need for redundancy, but when you add more electronics you also add more failure points. What if the "overseer" hardware fails? Suddenly none of the autopilots work...
  • DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner February 17, 2011 at 1:01am
    Been thinking about the possibility of running twp APMs in parrellel for a while now...
  • alexfarrington February 17, 2011 at 12:54am
    One of the boards is $6k, so with 3 of them, I'm sure you're gonna be somewhere around $20,000 or so...
  • Moderator
    Alex February 17, 2011 at 12:20am
    Why how much is it? :P
This reply was deleted.