CRI: CI-New: Collaborative Research: Extensible, Software Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

无人机(UAV)是一种新兴的计算平台，在我们的社会中越来越普遍。不幸的是，今天的大多数无人机系统要么是专有的，要么是专门针对航空和机器人任务的目标。该项目将为无人机开发一个开源和可扩展的软件基础设施，以促进对这项令人兴奋的技术的研究和教育。该提议将产生一个基础设施，允许跨计算堆栈、跨越操作系统(OS)、虚拟机(VM)、编译器、编程语言和应用程序的可扩展无人机软件设计。这极大地转移了无人机软件技术的重点，在这些软件中，精细化的支持仅限于硬件驱动程序和机器人控制，OS/VM支持是原始的，高级应用编程接口是最低限度的。由此产生的基础设施将促进无人机系统的全栈可扩展性、便携性、资源感知和应用友好性。该基础设施将使来自非无人机特定领域的研究人员能够在平台上进行研究。基础设施将影响跨越航空电子、机器人、实时系统、编程语言和软件工程领域的研究人员。拟议基础设施的其他受益者包括学生和无人机用户。该奖项下开发的技术将为无人机教育领域的博士生、硕士生和高级本科生提供培训和研究机会。无人机、机器人和航空对K-12的学生来说既有趣又令人兴奋。这个项目中的文物将为学生的外出活动量身定做。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an emerging computing platform increasingly becoming common in our society. Unfortunately, most UAV systems today are either proprietary, or specific to goals of aviation and robotic missions. This project will develop an open-source and extensible software infrastructure for UAVs to promote research and education of this exciting technology.The proposal will result in an infrastructure to allow for extensible UAV software design across the computing stack, spanning operating systems (OS), virtual machines (VM), compilers, programming languages, and applications. This significantly shifts the focus of state of the art of UAV software where refined support is limited to hardware drivers and robotics control, OS/VM support is primitive, and high-level Application Programming Interface is minimal. The resulting infrastructure will promote whole-stack extensibility, portability, resource awareness, and application friendliness of UAV systems. The infrastructure will enable researchers from non- UAV specific domains to conduct research on the platform.The infrastructure will impact researchers spanning areas of avionics, robotics, real-time systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Other beneficiaries of the proposed infrastructure include students and UAV users. The technologies developed under this award will provide training and research opportunities for Ph.D. students, master's students, and advanced undergraduates in UAV education. UAVs, robotics, and aviation are interesting and exciting to k-12 students. The artifacts from this project will be tailored for student outreach.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.