Quattro Flight Management System

The flight management system is a critical part of the unmanned system and often requires bespoke configuration and flight test procedures to reduce risk and achieve the highest levels of confidence and safety.  Applied Navigation provides the complete package: hardware, software, and support.

Our support is best in class.  Applied Navigation engineers have decades of experience with both manned and unmanned flight control, navigation, and flight test.  Our team has supported the first autonomous flights of over 30 unique vehicles including helicopters, fixed wing, and hybrid aircraft.  Our experience ranges from small electric vehicles to gas-powered heavy UAVs weighing over 1000 pounds.  We support our customers with vehicle simulation, initial settings, flight readiness review (FRR), and flight tests.

A focus on customer requirements has driven our flight control design to put safety and payload first.   The Quattro FMS controller uses forward prediction in time to generate a smooth path to achieve mission objectives while minimizing aircraft acceleration.  This includes all aspects of flight from the rotational motion of the vehicle, to the guidance path needed to fly waypoints, to speed and altitude control. This separation of desired flight path from the controller used to track the path allows the vehicle to be aggressive in fighting wind gusts while still providing the smoothest possible ride for the payload.

Triple-redundant, dissimilar inertial sensors enable a wider dynamic measurement range and fault tolerance during normal operation. If a catastrophic sensor failure occurs, the flight controller can fall back to degraded but flightworthy operation.

Input power is also redundant by allowing for failover to an auxiliary power source in the event of an in-flight brownout.

Differential communication busses (including CAN, Ethernet, and RS-485) are utilized to provide reliable communication between critical system components and payloads.

GNSS redundancy ensures reliable navigation from multiple GPS receivers.

Diagnostic monitoring begins the moment the Quattro FMS is powered on. At each start-up the system performs self-checks of its hardware components and generates a detailed reset report.

On the ground and during flight,  an extensive array of guidance, navigation, flight control, and health monitoring data is automatically logged to the connected MicroSD card.

Prior to each flight, the embedded controller performs detailed health checks and may automatically abort a pending launch based on pre-programmed abort criteria.

Simply put, a feature is not considered “done” until that feature is fully exercised by automated simulation tests made possible with our high-fidelity scripted flight simulation engine. Running faster than real-time and with scripting of commands, environment, and failures, this engine provides three core benefits:

• Fast and thorough software testing (leaving human testing to be exploratory and driven by intuition).
• The ability to perform operational Monte Carlo testing . Thousands of simulation runs are used to answer questions about the expected performance and operational limits of the system. Questions such as: “what is the expected landing accuracy?” or “what should the takeoff wind limitations be?”.
• A traceability matrix that links requirements to the unit tests and the individual code sections exercised by these tests.

The heart of the Quattro FMS is a modern Cortex-M7 32-bit processor providing reliable intra-vehicle high speed differential data transfer via Ethernet. Differential signaling is especially advantageous due to its high noise immunity, so CAN, RS-485, and USB connections are also available.

The dual redundant power inputs are protected from over-voltage, under-volltage, and reverse-voltage conditions and all I/O pins are protected from transient surge events.

BGA components are under-filled to ensure mechanical stability during high acceleration events.

To ensure longevity and reliability, the PCB stack is built to the IPC 6012 Class 3 and IPC-A-600 Class 3 performance and acceptability standards.