Hotpatching on the Fly - Mitigating Drone Incidents Arising From Incorrect Configuration

Ruidong Han, Juanru Li, Zhuo Ma, David Lo, Arash Shaghaghi, Jianfeng Ma, Siqi Ma

Abstract: Manufacturers offer adjustable control parameters for flight control systems to accommodate diverse environments and missions. To ensure flight safety, they also develop established boundaries, i.e., range specifications for parameter values. However, even when the configuration parameters fall within the prescribed manufacturer range, they could still lead to instability or even severe incidents like crashes, which are referred to as Range Specification Bugs. Prior research has suggested shrinking the range of parameter values to protect drones from the adverse effects of such bugs. However, narrowing the range of parameters may only reduce the probability of errors and could potentially limit the drone’s adaptability. To overcome this limitation, we present an online approach that analyzes a sequence of flight states to detect any potential triggering of bugs and rectify the drone by dynamically adjusting its parameters. We implemented the rectification approach, ConFix, and applied it in current prevalent flight control systems, Ardupilot and PX4. The results demonstrated that ConFix achieved an average rectification success rate of 80%.

External IDs:dblp:journals/tdsc/HanLMLSMM25