A fail-safe system is a mechanism designed to eliminate or minimize the risk of an undesirable outcome in the event of an unsafe situation caused by one or more faults. Currently many drones have a built-in fail-safe system.
The typical behavior is to perform a return to home operation followed by a controlled descent and landing. Commonly they are implemented on drone flight controllers, which run on single processor platforms without subsystem redundancy support. This make the systems vulnerable to single faults.
The objective of WP 3 is to develop a lightweight and low-power fault-tolerant fail-safe module that adds support for redundant subsystems and thereby increases the airworthiness of the drone. The fail-safe module may be retrofitted to drones already on the market or it may be integrated onto existing drone flight controllers.
The fail-safe module shields the drone flight controller from all connections to other subsystems such as power supply, sensors, motor and servo actuators, communication and payload. The module will be designed to support more advanced functionality to maintain airborne performance.