Improving Design of Ground Control Station for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Borrowing from Design Patterns

Reusable software architectures and supporting components are the focus of an increasing number of software organizations attempting to reduce software costs. One essential attribute of reusable software architecture is that it effectively isolates the logical, or static, aspects of the application from any product specific variations in the physical architecture, or execution environment. A primary element of this isolation is hardware and low-level software (e.g. operating system) independence. A design pattern documents a reference design for the solution to a recurring problem encountered in object-oriented software development. The fundamental theme of design patterns is to encapsulate the concepts that vary. This paper describes our experiences on developing reusable object-oriented software architecture for GCS (Ground Control Station) for UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) using design patterns. In addition, various ways that software architecture attributes can be designed for flexibility without introducing volatility into the physical architecture are described.