Preliminary system safety assessment of electromechanical actuation architectures for unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) undergo fastgrowing integration into civilian airspace. Recently, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) published regulations forming top-level safety targets for certified categories for UAVs. In this paper, we present a qualitative criticality analysis for a simplex electromechanical actuator (EMA) to evaluate the reliability of its components. Consequently, several hardware redundancies have been iterated to qualify the actuator architecture for the safety requirements and technical constraints. Finally, we verify the possible operating modes for the EMA using stochastic Markov models. Markov models have been also utilized for exploring health monitoring strategies for fault-tolerant features and their operating modes.