In the domain of embedded and cyber-physical systems there is a trend to more and more powerful ECUs (Electronic Control Units) and the development of sophisticated services (e.g., advanced driver-assistance features in the automobile sector) on top of them. In addition, there is an enormous cost pressure that recently led to colocation of multiple applications on a single system. While the resulting constraint set is already hard to satisfy, it gets even more challenging if some of these applications perform safety critical tasks. Here, soft errors caused by temporal hardware faults (i.e., bit flips in memory, data caches or processor registers) are a major threat. While protecting a complete system is too expensive in many domains, selectively sealing only safety critical application parts is promising.

I will present CoRed (Combined Redundancy), an approach that selectively hardens safety-critical parts of a systems against soft-errors. It features an input to output protection by using a combination of redundant execution and encoded processing. CoRed does not require specific knowledge about the application and is hardware independent. We evaluated CoRed in a realistic setting using a quadrotor helicopter and provide experimental evidence for soft-error resistance and comparable low resource demand.

In addition to the talk itself, I will present the I4Copter quadrotor helicopter, which is used as a platform for the implementation and evaluation of our approaches. The I4Copter quadrotor features a unique design, which has been developed to resemble real-world scenarios and to provide a stable demonstration quadrotor platform for various kinds of research and education projects. After my talk the I4Copter will be on display and Im looking forward to your feedback.