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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 2:18am
    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!
  • Distributor
    Martint BuildYourOwnDrone.co.uk February 17, 2011 at 2:17am
    @ John,

    I agree with your point, but as Ersin has said it's about redundancy in a system. I believe in many if not all commercial aircraft there are a number of duplicated systems which allow for a failed circuit to be isolated and a secondary circuit to be enabled, this level of back up offers increased safety in the event of a component failing in a system.
  • 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...
  • Ersin Acar February 17, 2011 at 1:43am
    there is no overseer hardware they will work with crosscheck (this mean you need fast CPUs). 3 hardware can't fail in same time; its very low possibility.

    If there is something wrong on power source you cant do anything ofc.
  • 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...
  • Distributor
    Martint BuildYourOwnDrone.co.uk February 17, 2011 at 1:28am

    @ Davey,

    I have been thinking about this also, I think that the minimum you could use would be three, if one were to "fail" then you would need the confirmation from another source to compare, if you only had two, how would you know which one was producing the correct information.

     

    www.buildyourowndrone.co.uk

  • Ersin Acar February 17, 2011 at 1:21am
    @alexfarrington; NOOO! Why did you do that! People will die cuz of you!
  • 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...
  • Ersin Acar February 17, 2011 at 12:29am
    Dude belive me dont look at it!
This reply was deleted.