Teaching Mixed-Criticality: Multi-Rotor Flight Control and Payload Processing on a Single Chip

Modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) already integrate multiple functions and this trend is expected to grow in the near future for economic reasons. Mixed-Criticality Cyber-Physical Systems (MC-CPS) impose the challenging task of integrating safety-critical and non-safety critical applications on the same device or even on the same System-on-Chip. The engineering of MC-CPS requires competences from different disciplines, such as physics, mechatronics, electrical engineering, embedded HW/SW design, real-time systems, software engineering, control theory, and safety analysis. Most of these disciplines are covered by university courses, but the application of these techniques on the design of a real MC-CPS can hardly be handled in a regular course. In this paper, the concept, organization, technical outcomes and discussion of the experiences of a two-term student project group is presented. The group performed the specification, implementation and test of a mixed-criticality multi-rotor system: integrating a safety-critical flight control algorithm with mission-critical payload processing on a single chip. Based on this experience, a student project group for teaching the interdisciplinary and crosscutting topic of mixed-criticality within a traditional technical computer science curriculum is advocated.