by Anthony Leonardo Gracio
GPS for bare-metal developers
In my previous blog article, I exposed some techniques that helped me rewrite the Crazyflie’s firmware from C into Ada and SPARK 2014, in order to improve its safety.
Anthony Leonardo Gracio
Anthony Leonardo Gracio is a software engineer at AdaCore. He joined AdaCore in 2015 after he got an engineering degree at EPITA, an engineering school in Paris. He is currently working in the GPS (GNAT Programming Studio) team.
2 entries written by Anthony Leonardo Gracio
by Anthony Leonardo Gracio
How to prevent drone crashes using SPARK
The Crazyflie is a very small quadcopter sold as an open source development platform: both electronic schematics and source code are directly available on their GitHub and its architecture is very flexible. Even if the Crazyflie flies out of the box, it has not been developed with safety in mind: in case of crash, its size, its weight and its plastic propellers won’t hurt anyone! But what if the propellers were made of carbon fiber, and shaped like razor blades to increase the drone’s performance? In theses circumstances, a bug in the flight control system could lead to dramatic events. In this post, I present the work I did to rewrite the stabilization system of the Crazyflie in SPARK 2014, and to prove that it is free of runtime errors. SPARK also helped me to discover little bugs in the original firmware, one of which directly related with overflows. Besides the Crazyflie, this work could be an inspiration for others to do the same work on larger and more safety-critical drones.