4.1.   INTRODUCTION

The open control platform (OCP) is an important software technology
component of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) Software Enabled Control (SEC) research program. The OCP
provides an open, middleware-enabled software framework and development
platform for controls technology researchers who want to demonstrate their
technology in simulated or actual embedded system platforms. The middleware
layer of the OCP provides the software layer isolating the application
from the underlying target platform. It provides services for controlling the
execution and scheduling of components, inter-component communication,
and distribution and deployment of application components onto a target
system. The embedded system domain of particular interest to the SEC
program is that of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs).

This chapter describes the OCP approach to handling the challenges of
UAV control, including support for all levels of vehicle control (including
low-level flight control), interaction between a UAV and other platforms
(e.g., another UAV, ground station, piloted aircraft), innovative scheduling
techniques, adaptive resource management, and support for dynamic reconfiguration.

The OCP is being developed by the Embedded Systems Research Team
within the Boeing Phantom Works Open Systems Architecture organization.
Assisting Boeing in these efforts are the Georgia Institute of Technology,
Honeywell Labs, and the University of California at Berkeley. The OCP is
being delivered to a host of university and industrial researchers who are
participating in the SEC program.

The OCP is an object-oriented (OO) software infrastructure designed to
enhance the ability to analyze, develop, and test UAV control algorithms and
embedded software. Figure 4.1 shows the role of the OCP in pulling together
technologies into real demonstrations and ultimately transitions to future
programs. The OCP includes a middleware framework for integrating embedded
application software components with useful services important to
the UAV control domain, support for UAV simulation with a simulation
framework, and integration with embedded software design and analysis
tools. The OCP is also planned for use in a variety of live flight demonstrations
on a variety of autonomous flight platforms.

The OCP presents many benefits to the embedded system developer. In
particular, the OCP provides a path for quick transition of controls design
to desktop and embedded targets. It allows a controls designer to focus on
controls design instead of software design by handling the issues of integration,
communication, distribution, portability, execution, scheduling, system
configuration, and resource management.