Development and Flight Testing of an Adaptable Vehicle Health-Monitoring Architecture.

Development and testing of an adaptable vehicle health-monitoring architecture is presented. The architecture is being developed for a fleet of vehicles. It has three operational levels: one or more remote data acquisition units located throughout a vehicle, a command and control unit located within a vehicle, and a terminal collection unit to collect analysis results from all vehicles. Each level is capable of performing autonomous analysis with a trained expert system. The expert system is parameterized, which makes it adaptable to be trained to both a user's subjective reasoning and existing quantitative analytic tools. Communication between all levels is done with wireless radio frequency interfaces. The remote data acquisition unit has an eight-channel programmable digital interface that allows the user discretion for choosing type of sensors, number of sensors, sensor sampling rate, and sampling duration for each sensor. The architecture provides framework for a tributary analysis. All measurements at the lowest operational level are reduced to provide analysis results necessary to gauge changes from established baselines. These are then collected at the next level to identify any global trends or common features from the prior level. This process is repeated until the results are reduced at the highest operational level. In the framework, only analysis results are forwarded to the next level to reduce telemetry congestion. The system's remote data acquisition hardware and nonanalysis software have been flight tested on the NASA Langley Research Center's B757 main landing gear to validate the wireless radio frequency communication capabilities of the system, the hardware design, command and control, software operation, and, data acquisition, storage, and retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]