UCSAM: A UAV Ground Control System Architecture Supporting Cooperative Control Among Multi-form Stations based on MDA and Container Cloud Platform

An open, unified and loosely coupled service oriented software architecture of UAV Ground Control System (UGCS) based on container cloud platform is proposed in this paper, which is called “UCSAM”, and can support the collaborative control of UAV among multi-form ground control stations, such as portable, mobile and fixed stations. UCSAM establishes a kind of software computing environment based on the component framework conforming to the OSGi specifications on the client side, the container cloud platform on the server side, and the middleware conforming to the DDS and other transmission protocols between the two, so that the application software components on the client side and the FDSCs(Functional Domain Service Components) on the server side only rely on standardized APIs, so as to realize the architecture features of resource allocation on demand and cross platform portability. On the other hand, UCSAM defines PSM based on Open Application Model (OAM), including message model, service model and application model, which separates FDSC development from the operation and maintenance complexity of infrastructure software. Through a set of tool chains, it realizes the conversion from PIM based on XMI format to PSM based on OAM, code generation based on template and PSM, CI/CD based on GitOps, and dynamic deployment based on AppStore, so as to achieve the architectural goal of dynamic generation of capabilities, and the agile software development mode based on MDA and DevOps. Lastly, several study cases including UAV cooperative application, development of functional domain service components, and application deployment and operation are briefly discussed to verify this architecture's correctness and feasibility.