How Urban Air Mobility is getting ready for passengers: the NTU Singapore case
Singapore’s NTU flew its eVTOL prototypes in Germany. See what it means for urban air mobility, and why safety starts in flight control.
The common use of servos in unmanned aircraft is usually the management of control surfaces and their payloads. Therefore, in UAS performing critical operations, it is especially recommended to use professional redundant servos to enhance their reliability, avoiding risks of causing big losses or damages to third parties.
Professional advantages of redundant servos
Redundant servos have two redundant input buses in order to give them higher reliability. Due to the said redundancy, it is possible to avoid critical failures in unmanned aircraft if one of the internal buses of the control system fails or if the wiring between the control system and the servo is the one not performing the expected tasks. We would have a second line of entrance to maintain the navigation with no incidents.
Some important features of redundant servos that improve the aircraft’s reliability are the following:
- Position feedback: The servo is able to inform about its current position angle in comparison to its origin, obtaining from the servo a confirmation that can be used in later analysis.
- Electronics sensors: These sensors can warn about the electronics status, having the capacity to decide whether to stop the operation if critical values are exceeded.
- Management of redundancy status: It allows to warn about the failure of an input in order to use just the operative one, since it is possible to send and receive commands through a single input.
Integration of Veronte Autopilot 1x with redundant servos
Redundant servos are fully integrated with Veronte Autopilot 1x. Specifically, successful integrations have been performed with redundant Volz models for critical unmanned aircraft, obtaining the maximum performance of those servos and making the most of their reliability.
Veronte Autopilot 1x is able to control redundant servos through communications RS232, RS485, I2C, UART, PW, IO, CAN,… RS485 and CAN communications are remarkable since they are formed by a differential bus, which protects the signal from external perturbations and/or noise made by the UAS. Besides, RS485 communications have internal mechanisms to check data frames, such as CRC and CheckSum.
Other advantages of Veronte Autopilot 1x consist of the servos calibration, which can be done through some easy steps from Veronte PIPE control software. In addition, the combination of Veronte Autopilot 1x with redundant servos is the best option to deal with the certification process of unmanned aircraft.
