Remotely piloted vehicles are usually deployed in various applications especially those requiring remote sensing. RPV s, as they are usually called, are very versatile remote data collection tools, especially for aerial imaging of hard to reach terrain such as mountains and deserts. The sensed images obtained from several such RPV s may be either fused together in a data fusion system, or may be individually used for various engineering applications. The reliability of these unmanned remotely piloted vehicles is of great concern due to the vast amount of expenses incurred in setting up an engineering program to sense RPV obtained data in a given application. The most common approaches for the analysis of the reliability of systems are the state space approach and the reliability block diagram (RBD) approach. The expected operating conditions of the system also play an important role in the analysis of the reliability of the system since they affect its mean lifetime. In this study, RBD and state space modeling are used for the analysis of the reliability of the guidance, navigation and control computer system of a remotely piloted vehicle in its various expected operating conditions during its lifetime. It is shown that the reliability of the system may be effectively improved by designing in redundancy where none of the other viable measures of reliability growth are available to us. Measures of reliability such as MTTF, MTTR, and availability are estimated under various system operating conditions.

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