| The
JAviator project is a research project of the Computational
Systems Group
at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Salzburg,
Austria. The goal of the project is to develop high-level real-time and
concurrent programming abstractions and test them on UAVs (unmanned
aerial vehicles). We are working on methodologies that enable
time-portable programming of high-performance, hard real-time
applications in Java. The resulting application code is not only
efficient but also robust with respect to real time. Time-portable
programs do not change their real-time behavior across different
hardware platforms and workloads similar to Java's
write-once-run-anywhere paradigm for functional behavior but extended
to the temporal domain. In collaboration with the IBM
T.J. Watson Research Center
in Hawthorne, New York, USA, we are developing a software
infrastructure that supports the time-portable execution of Java
programs. We test our implementations on the JAviator, which is an
electric quadrotor helicopter shaped like a cross with four rotors, one
at each end. One pair of opposite rotors spins clockwise, the other
counter-clockwise. The JAviator is controlled merely by adjusting the
rotors' speed without changing the angle of its rotor blades. The
JAviator is mechanically simpler than a traditional helicopter but very
agile yet still inherently unstable and therefore very hard to fly. We
have designed and manufactured the JAviator completely from scratch
using only high-performance materials such as carbon fiber, aircraft
aluminum, and medical titanium. The JAviator is an autonomously flying
software laboratory that supports high payloads for a variety of
complex sensors such as GPS, sonars, and lasers as well as networking
services such as WLAN and wireless RS232. |
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