The official term is unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), apparently, which is a bit of a mouthful, so we prefer to say drone. In any case, we developed a controller for a UAV (drone) for a customer using a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ SoC, whose CPUs implement the position control as well as tracking of the flight trajectory. The sensors and actors are attached through the FPGA logic; the number and type of these interfaces vary greatly with the type of controlled vehicle, so all of these interfaces are dynamically configurable.

The controller also supports redundancy, by having two parallel flight calculator units supervising each other. Should the currently active calculator fail, the reserve unit takes over all tasks autonomously. Aside flight control functions, the controller prepares and compresses a Full-HD video signal (HD-SDI) from a camera for transmission over radio.

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