| Title |
Current Status of Embedded System Technologies for UAV and UAM |
| Authors |
박주호(Juho Park) ; 임헌국(Huhnkuk Lim) |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.5573/ieie.2026.63.10.72 |
| Keywords |
Urban air mobility(UAM); Unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV); Embedded system; Electric vertical take-off and landing(eVTOL); Real-time operating system(RTOS) |
| Abstract |
Although Urban Air Mobility (UAM) may appear to be a technological extension of existing small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the two systems ultimately pursue different objectives. While UAVs generally emphasize mission efficiency, reductions in size, weight, and power (SWaP), and development flexibility across various applications, UAM systems prioritize levels of safety and reliability comparable to those required for commercial aircraft because they are intended to transport passengers and cargo over urban areas. This paper analyzes how these differences in operational objectives and design priorities are reflected in embedded system design. It first examines the architectures of UAV and UAM embedded systems in terms of hardware, software, sensors, and interfaces. It then reviews the embedded software technologies of both systems in terms of operating system architecture, communication middleware, and flight control algorithms. Based on this, the two systems are shown to diverge less in the maturity of individual technologies than in the operational objectives and the consequences of failure they must account for, differences that propagate into redundancy schemes, software partitioning, and certification frameworks. The paper further shows that the immediate challenge for UAM lies in demonstrating compliance with certification criteria rather than in acquiring new technologies, and identifies multi-core interference control, determinism of communication middleware, and flight-test validation of advanced control laws as directions for future work. |