A test bed for measuring UAV servo reliability

The era of Unmanned aviation is flourishing and advancing in leaps and bounds jumping over all challenges and obstacles. One of the serious hinderances to the booming industry is the lack of sufficient reliability studies about the systems used on board these flying robots. Accordingly, this poses a threat to the safety and well-being of human communities as well as the loss of assets, especially in BLOS flights. The need for a reliable endurance investigation is emerging from the fact that many of the systems and components used on UAS are COTS which comes with scarce information, if any, about its reliability and operation-life expectancy. This topic is of vital importance to regulatory organizations to consider legalizing commercial flights that are not in the field of the human operators' line of sight. Servos are one type of these crucial components used in UAS which lack thorough reliability evaluations. This study addresses this concern through a case study of the servo used on the Boeing Insitu ScanEagle to control its ailerons. To offer the expected information about the reliability of the components, a destructive test platform was sought. A test-bed was designed to operate the servo to failure using the actual commanded positions it operates to in its real-life service. The test-bed commands the servo and logs its actual movements along with the commanded positions. These logs are used to detect the discrepancy between the commanded and actual positions to give a statistical estimate about how long the servo will endure.