UAS Operators Safety and Reliability Survey: Emerging Technologies towards the Certification of Autonomous UAS

This paper details the results of a survey on safety and reliability of commercial Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), issued to 1500 companies in the UK, with a 10% response rate. The results of this study concur with previous studies that commercial UAS have a failure rate of 1/103 flight hours. Furthermore, we found a reported 49% of companies believe a critical failure will occur within every 500 hours of flight. We investigate the responses concerning UAS subsystems; the experience of onboard intelligent systems, current practices around the frequency of maintenance and servicing of subsystems, and subsystems identified in order of the highest likelihood of failure. Informed by the results of this survey and a state of the art literature review we identify emerging technologies and methods as candidate solutions to the respondents reported challenges, such as; Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM), Formal Methods, Simulations and Fault Tolerant Control (FTC). The integration of these techniques, in a systematic framework with a supporting automatic tool-chain, is identified as a candidate solution to reliability and certification challenges in UAS.