University study on bugs in drone software

[daricket]

I’m working on a study to understand the most common sources of bugs in drone software. I’d love to hear from Crazyflie developers about where bugs commonly arise. Here is a certainly non-exhaustive list of potential sources of problems:

• Mathematical mistakes in control laws
  Control implementation bugs
  Interactions between multiple controllers/modes
  Floating point exceptions
  Floating point rounding error
  Memory issues
  Timing issues
  Mode switch issues
  Sensor fusion problems
  Failure to notify user of a problem
  Communication failures

I’m using the loosest possible interpretation of “bug”, so a bug could be an important missing feature, a bad user interface design, etc. Another way of putting this is: what aspects of drone software are the most difficult to get right?

Just for some context, this is a part of a project to develop better verification tools and techniques for cyber-physical systems (veridrone.ucsd.edu). Our hope is to use this study to focus our work on the most common sources of issues in drone software.

[chad]

Having worked in the software industry for over two decades I can say hands-down, unequivocally, without reservation the main source of bugs in any software is the developers writing it!