I would like to share an idea of extension of unified data bus for drone onboard electronics to the ground control station (GCS). The idea is highly rough and abstract, but still I will try to explain it.
It is about to connect GCS to the onboard bus as a node. That means that GCS will communicate with other nodes (with flight controller for example) via Cyphal. In this way we don’t need MAVlink for telemetry anymore. The link between GCS and flight controller will consist physically of the onboard bus (for example redundant CAN based) and radio link, that might be redundant too. But on the application layer nothing will change. I believe this approach could simplify the design of fault tolerant unmanned aviation systems.
What do you think, does Cyphal make it feasible?
While this is not the primary use case for Cyphal, it is not unreasonable. I know that @coder_kalyan has done some work to this end and I would like to invite him to share the status of said work.
What would be the underlying transport? Cyphal only defines how to integrate with existing network layers like CAN or UDP. You’d need some well-defined layer to port it to.
I think Cyphal/serial is a decent off-the-shelf choice for this task. Going forward, one could consider defining a Cyphal/LoRA or Cyphal/MQTT or some other alternative transport tailored for off-board communications.
Cyphal/MQTT would be a neat project especially if we could build a demonstration using FreeRTOS and the AWS IoT SDK.
To put my hat in the ring, as well as tease some stuff, we at CWRU Motorsports are currently working on a Cyphal/LoRa implementation. More information to come this summer.
Sounds interesting. I invite you to provide inputs to Generalized mapping of Cyphal to transports - #2 by pavel.kirienko