Fleet Consensus: OTA Update Framework for Autonomous Systems

Over-the-Air (OTA) updates present significant challenges for autonomous vehicle fleets and UAV swarms, particularly in maintaining system integrity while minimizing operational disruption. This paper proposes a hierarchical update management framework for coordinated software deployment across heterogeneous autonomous systems. We implement a distributed consensus protocol based on a modified Raft algorithm, combined with a lightweight validation mechanism on edge computing nodes. Our approach introduces a two-phase update strategy: first, a leader-follower architecture validates updates on a subset of vehicles under controlled conditions, followed by gradual fleet-wide deployment with automated rollback capabilities. We evaluate our framework on a testbed of 12 autonomous vehicles and 24 UAVs across urban and suburban virtualized environments, comparing against three baseline update strategies. Results demonstrate a 47% reduction in update completion time compared to traditional sequential deployment, while maintaining a 99.9% success rate for update validation. Our system achieves these improvements while requiring only 23 % of the bandwidth utilized by existing fleet-wide update solutions. We also present a comprehensive security analysis, identifying potential attack vectors in V2X communication during updates and implementing countermeasures through PKI-based authentication and real-time anomaly detection.