Adaptive Prognostic Malfunction Based Processor for Autonomous Landing Guidance Assistance System Using FPGA

Abstract

The demand for more developed and agile urban taxi drones is increasing rapidly nowadays to sustain crowded cities and their traffic issues. The critical factor for spreading such technology could be related to the safety criteria that must be considered. One of the most critical safety aspects for such vertical and/or Short Take-Off and Landing (V/STOL) drones is related to safety during the landing stage, in which most of the recent flight accidents have occurred. This paper focused on solving this issue by proposing decentralized processing cores that could improve the landing failure rate by depending on a Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) and additional Digital Signal Processing (DSP) elements. Also, the proposed system will enhance the safety factor during the landing stages by adding a self-awareness feature in case a certain sensor malfunction occurs using the proposed Adaptive Prognostic Malfunction Unit (APMU). This proposed coarse-grained Autonomous Landing Guidance Assistance System (ALGAS4) processing architecture has been optimized using different optimization techniques. The ALGAS4 architecture has been designed completely using VHDL, and the targeted FPGA was the INTEL Cyclone V 5CGXFC9D6F27C7 chip. According to the synthesis findings of the INTEL Quartus Prime software, the maximum working frequency of the ALGAS4 system is 278.24 MHz. In addition, the proposed ALGAS4 system could maintain a maximum computing performance of approximately 74.85 GOPS while using just 166.56 mW for dynamic and I/O power dissipation.