Safety and Certification of UAVs

Certification of UAVs reopens the issues of certification of software-heavy critical systems. Current practices are both costly and unable to ensure full coverage of failures. We propose to revisit the FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) as a framework for streamlining certification of critical software systems. Using object oriented design environments we have shown that not only is the FMEA an effective framework for certification, but that we were able to automate a large part of the effort. The resulting certification process is both cost effective and verifiable. We provide an example of this method.