Design and Implementation of a Heterogeneous and Dual-Redundancy Flight Control and Navigation System Based on the ZYNQ Platform

The flight control system is the core of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for accomplishing various complex tasks. Addressing issues in existing flight control platforms, such as insufficient real-time performance, low computational precision and flexibility, poor system reliability, and lengthy algorithm deployment cycles, this paper presents the design and implementation of a high-performance heterogeneous dual-redundancy flight control and navigation system. The hardware platform is based on the ZYNQ-7000 All Programmable System on Chip platform, which integrates ARM Processing System (PS) and FPGA Programmable Logic (PL), leveraging a heterogeneous multi-core architecture to enhance computational capabilities and support dual-redundancy system backup. On the software side, the system integrates VxWorks and Ubuntu operating systems in a collaborative manner and adopts a Model-Based Design (MBD) approach for algorithm development, improving system stability and adaptability to diverse mission types. This UAV flight control system architecture offers high integration, compact size, and strong expandability. The implemented system achieves significant performance improvements: compact size of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$51 \times 66 ~\text{mm}$</tex> with weight of only 46.8 g, power consumption less than 10 W, operating temperature range of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$-20 \sim 80^{\circ} \mathrm{C}$</tex>, attitude accuracy of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\pm 0.5^{\circ}$</tex> for both roll and pitch, and mission reliability of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$5.504 \times 10^{-8}$</tex> (better than 10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−4</sup> requirement). The dual-redundancy design ensures high fault tolerance with communication function reliability of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$8.046 \times 10^{-9}$</tex>. Each unit can efficiently collaborate to achieve complex intended objectives, making it suitable for harsh operational environments and versatile across various aircraft models.