Design of flight control software for small unmanned aerial vehicle based on VxWorks

Flight control software, as the kernel of flight control system, is responsible for the coordination, scheduling and management of subsystems. Aiming at small UAVs´ increasingly complex functionality and actuality that needs to improve reliability and real-time performance urgently, this paper presents the design and development of flight control software based on VxWorks real-time operating system. Based on the implement of software function design, this paper focus on the design of task classification, priority assigning and task communication mechanism. The result shows that multi-task mechanism based on VxWorks has remarkably improved the reliability and real-time capability of UAV flight control software, and greatly enhances the maintainability and portability.