Bitcraze Forums

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.

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!