Smart mini actuators for safety critical unmanned aerial vehicles

The present article details the development steps and experimental results obtained during the development of smart actuators used for mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Unlike the commercial off-the-shelf hobby components, these units are able to measure position, angular rate and current, furthermore with their controlling microprocessors they are capable of establishing two way communication via CAN and FlexRay protocol. They are suitable for safety critical applications, and self diagnostics features are also hosted onboard the actuators to be part of a redundant, distributed control network. The development challenges and experimental results in an example hardware-in-the-loop simulator of an Unmanned Aerial System are discussed in the paper.