An Open-Source Software Platform for AWE Systems

Matheus Winter MSc Student

Federal University of Santa Catarina Department of Automation and Systems

DAS/CTC-UFSC Campus Trindade 88040-900 Florianópolis, SC

Brazil

winter.matheus@gmail.com ufsckite.gitlab.io

An Open-Source Software Platform for AWE Systems

Federal University of Santa Catarina Airborne wind energy prototypes are complex

mecha-tronic devices involving many multidisciplinary aspects and for which there are currently no established design guidelines. Therefore, newcomers to the field are re-quired to either purchase expensive software and hard-ware not specifically designed for AWE applications or build their own solutions from scratch. Given the im-portance of prototyping, this scenario poses an economi-cal and technieconomi-cal entry barrier, delaying experimental re-sults, and limiting cooperation among the different orga-nizations. As an attempt to partially overcome this chal-lenge, we propose an open-source embedded software platform on top of which AWE systems can be developed. Similarly to what happened in other areas, such as com-puter vision and robotics, we believe that a standardized software platform could ease the development process of AWE prototypes. Based on our own experience, software teams involved in any mid- to large-scale projects are usually composed of people from different backgrounds and levels of expertise. In order to cope with this di-versity, low-level details should be abstracted away from the average developer, allowing them to focus on the as-pects directly related to their tasks. Moreover, changes in the requirements, physical characteristics of the pro-totypes, and operating conditions are common, and their impact in the software should be minimized, which re-quires great flexibility from the tools and components employed.

This work proposes a lightweight software platform writ-ten mainly in C, and initially targeting low cost

single-board computers running Linux. Regarding its architec-ture, the proposed platform is designed in such a way that it allows for the AWE system to be split into highly de-coupled functional modules running in a distributed fash-ion as independent processes, possibly across several computational units, and capable of exchanging informa-tion through a standard, high-performance communica-tion infrastructure based on the publisher-subscriber pat-tern. Implementation intricacies are kept transparent to the end developer by means of a standardized API that provides extensible and versatile data structures upon which developers can build and configure their own spe-cific modules.

Besides providing a carefully chosen set of dependen-cies, which are fetched and installed during an automatic build phase, the platform also provides a series of facili-ties to the developer, including remote deployment, real-time monitoring, logging, code instrumentation and de-bug tools. The designed platform is suitable for applica-tion in AWE and could indeed benefit its growing commu-nity, especially in what comes to module reuse and shar-ing. Other advantages such as high flexibility, lower de-velopment and maintenance efforts, and ease of integra-tion with external systems including user interfaces and simulation environments are demonstrated through case studies involving two small scale AWE prototypes oper-ating both in a lab environment and in real-world condi-tions.