By Ron Chen, Correspondent ASEAN Region and Ifeoma Asika, Correspondent Campuses

The Secure Systems Research Centre (SSRC) at Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has announced the launch of its first Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC-V) based drone flight controller that leverages the Centre’s own secure PX4 stack. The flight marks a milestone in SSRC’s path to making RISC-V based UAV systems a reality through this successful testing and validation of the RISC-V + the secure PX4 stack system.

Earlier this year, the Centre became a strategic member of RISC-V International, a non-profit organisation controlled by its members, which directs the future development and drives the adoption of RISC-V free and open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). SSRC is focused on building an RISC-V based secure flight computer system. Today’s milestone is a major signpost on this path, with the Centre using a commercially available RISC-V development platform to port the DroneCode PX4 open source software to RISC-V.

CEO of TII, Dr. Ray O. Johnson said: “RISC-V’s ISA is revolutionising the world of computing systems, and TII is proud to build this capability into our growing collection of breakthrough solutions that are future-proofing our world – one step at a time. We are seeing the use cases for drones and similar autonomous systems now spanning multiple sectors from e-commerce to healthcare and communication to security. This achievement will further strengthen our credibility as a global research centre at the forefront of cutting-edge technology that is working to shape an enabled and more secure world.”

Chief Researcher, SSRC, Dr. Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar said: “We are putting TII on the world map as leaders in pioneering Zero Trust Drone System research through this effort. The DroneCode community is the leading open-source community of PX4 Autopilot and fight controller hardware code and specification, respectively. A significant part of the work in realising this project required the porting of NuttX real-time OS and PX4 flight controller software to the RISC-V platform. SSRC has already included some of the planned security improvements into its existing PX4 software stack, and we will continue to develop this software and contribute the modifications back to open source.”

He added: “Through this milestone, we intend to highlight our regional expertise in the research and development of security for Drone and Autonomous Systems, an area that is set to have an outsized impact in shaping the Smart Cities of the future – making them safer and also significantly accelerating the opportunities for new services.”

As a follow-up, SSRC will continue to improve the security and resilience of the open source PX4 flight control software stack and NuttX real-time OS in collaboration with open source community. Furthermore, the Centre has presented a roadmap that includes improving memory protection of NuttX OS and PX4, protecting data on the removable media and utilising commercially available Root-of-Trust components.

Drone Software Lead Engineer and Architect at the SSRC in TII and Technical Lead for Dronecode Security Special Interest Group Jukka Laitinen also presented a talk on making the current drone platform better, more secure, and resilient at the PX4 Autopilot Development Summit in September 2021.

SSRC is on track to achieving the first TII custom flight controller hardware, with the initial prototypes of this hardware, using a commercial off-the-shelf RISC-V SoC, expected by Q1 2022. This will enable researchers and industry to replace existing commercial flight controllers with a TII secure flight controller.