An exploratory study of autopilot software bugs in unmanned aerial vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly important and widely used in modern society. Software bugs in these systems can cause severe issues, such as system crashes, hangs, and undefined behaviors. Some bugs can also be exploited by hackers to launch security attacks, resulting in catastrophic consequences. Therefore, techniques that can help detect and fix software bugs in UAVs are highly desirable. However, although there are many existing studies on bugs in various types of software, the characteristics of UAV software bugs have never been systematically studied. This impedes the development of tools for assuring the dependability of UAVs. To bridge this gap, we conducted the first large-scale empirical study on two well-known open-source autopilot software platforms for UAVs, namely PX4 and Ardupilot, to characterize bugs in UAVs. Through analyzing 569 bugs from these two projects, we observed eight types of UAV-specific bugs (i.e., limit, math, inconsistency, priority, parameter, hardware support, correction, and initialization) and learned their root causes. Based on the bug taxonomy, we summarized common bug patterns and repairing strategies. We further identified five challenges associated with detecting and fixing such UAV-specific bugs. Our study can help researchers and practitioners to better understand the threats to the dependability of UAV systems and facilitate the future development of UAV bug diagnosis tools.