Towards Generic Requirements and Models for Automated Mission Tasks with RPAS

This work proposes an approach to create a set of generic mission automation requirements as well as a generic execution model for unmanned aircraft. Even at the highest requirement level, regulations for unmanned aircraft are dissimilar across different countries and thus regulation still comprises lack of requirements. Due to the comparably young domain of todays unmanned vehicles, the scientific and commercial communities have difficulties to define adequate safety requirements and system requirements. This is especially the case for highly automated software functions. There is no straightforward transition from existing automation in manned aviation’s pilot assistance systems into a timely and spatially contained autonomous function. Additionally pilot abilities must be transformed into software functions. However, for unmanned aircraft certification with today’s standards the corresponding validation and verification activities are expected to require a lot of resource intensive software activities like manual inspection efforts. To support requirement validation at early development stages with respect to acceptability, we present an approach that is based on a generic autonomous systems taxonomy of capabilities. Therefore, we propose a shared set of generic high-level requirements as well as a generic mission execution model for automated mission task elements that can be performed by many types of unmanned aircraft. This way, our approach tries to support the unmanned aircraft community by a common understanding of unmanned aircraft capabilities by using existing inherited terms and concepts. Moreover, the derived requirements and models are meant to facilitate the design of automated functions that are already in use by academia and industry research today.