Model-Based Systems Engineering Framework for SysML-Driven Design of Autonomous UAVs

2026-08-10

AI Summary

This work addresses the common challenges in autonomous drone development—such as fragmented requirements, architectural inconsistencies, and poor traceability—stemming from disjointed design processes. To bridge these gaps, the authors propose a SysML-based model-driven systems engineering framework that integrates a unified four-layer model encompassing requirements, functions, logical components, and physical/software elements. Crucially, this approach establishes, for the first time, a deep alignment between multiple SysML diagrams—including requirement, activity, and block definition diagrams—and the ROS 2 architecture, specifically its nodes, topics, services, and actions. The framework enables end-to-end traceable design, allowing early-stage allocation of requirements, precise interface specification, clear subsystem responsibility assignment, and verification planning—all prior to simulation or deployment—thereby effectively supporting typical mission scenarios such as obstacle avoidance and return-to-home operations.

Abstract

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are complex cyber-physical systems that require the coordinated integration of flight control, navigation, perception, communication, power management, and mission-level decision-making under safety, timing, and reliability constraints. However, many autonomous UAV development workflows still rely on document-centric requirements, separated architectural descriptions, and software implementation artifacts, which can lead to ambiguity, interface inconsistencies, and weak traceability during early design. This paper presents a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) design framework for the SysML-driven development of autonomous UAVs. The proposed framework uses the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) as a formal design backbone to structure UAV development across four connected layers: stakeholder requirements, functional decomposition, logical architecture, and physical/software allocation. SysML requirement diagrams, activity diagrams, block definition diagrams, internal block diagrams, state machine diagrams, and parametric diagrams are used to capture the functional, structural, behavioral, interface, and performance aspects of the UAV system. The logical architecture is then systematically mapped to a Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) software architecture by relating SysML blocks to ROS 2 nodes, flow ports and connectors to topics, request-response interactions to services, and goal-oriented behaviors to actions. The framework is illustrated at the design level using representative autonomous UAV mission scenarios, including autonomous take-off, waypoint navigation, hover stabilization, obstacle avoidance, return-to-home, and emergency handling. The resulting model supports requirement allocation, interface definition, subsystem responsibility assignment, and verification planning before simulation or physical deployment.

Problem

• Autonomous UAVs
• Model-Based Systems Engineering
• SysML
• Design Traceability
• Interface Consistency

Innovation

• Model-Based Systems Engineering
• SysML
• Autonomous UAVs
• ROS 2
• System-Software Co-Design