News:  RIVA team members win Space Act Award
 
Several Code IC researchers are part of a team that recently received a Space Act Award for their work on "A Comprehensive Toolset for Model-based Health Monitoring and Diagnostics."  This contribution is a software toolset for designing and developing diagnostic applications such as those required in Integrated Vehicle Health Management systems. Three software tools that support systems engineering, systems design and testability, automated diagnostics and troubleshooting, and system autonomy have been developed during a seven-year collaboration between researchers at NASA Ames Research Center and Qualtech Systems, Inc.
 
The tools are: 1) TEAMS 5.0, the Testability Engineering And Maintenance System, a tool used in static design/analysis phases of complex systems; 2) TEAMS-RT, a real-time diagnostic engine that provides diagnostic functionality for integrated vehicle health systems on board a flight vehicle or embedded into a run-time architecture; and 3) RDS, the Remote Diagnosis Server, an application that can support multiple simultaneous diagnostic sessions from a variety of remote systems. Programs that will benefit from this technology include commercial and military aviation, advanced transportation systems, Shuttle, International Space Station, and robotic and autonomous explorers.
Team members include:  Ann Patterson-Hine, Rick Alena, and Dwight Sanderfer from Code IC.  Bill Hindson from Code JO. Julie Schonfeld and Jim Cockrell, Code FES. Kevin Cavanaugh, Somnath Deb, Charles Domagala, Sudipto Ghoshal, Venkata Malepati, Venkatesulu Malepati , Krishna Pattipati, and Roshan Shrestha from Qualtech Systems, Inc.
 
For more information on QSI’s TEAMS toolset, go to http://teamqsi.com
 
Projects:
 
Intelligent Automation
Lead:  Ann Patterson-Hine and John Kaneshige
 
Intelligence can be defined as the ability to “do the right thing” when faced with a complex decision-making situation. Vehicle intelligence, capable of making reliable decisions with limited human intervention, has the potential for improving safety, enhancing mission effectiveness, and enabling extreme missions. To accomplish these goals, on-board systems must exhibit increasingly higher levels of automation capable of responding to changing goals and objectives, while taking corrective actions in the presence of internal and external events.
 
Current levels of automation allow pilots to assign direct tasks to automatic systems, such as monitoring/caution and warning systems or automatic pilots.  These autopilots have been used in commercial aircraft for a number of years.  While their design can incorporate many aspects of a pilot’s experience, they do not possess the reasoning or learning abilities of a pilot.  As a result, pilots are still responsible for supervising the performance of these systems as well as providing direction in the event of required changes.  By applying intelligent methods of automation, pilots, ground-based operators, or autonomous executives can defer the responsibilities from performing and supervising tasks, to focus on managing goals and objectives.
 
The Intelligent Automation (IA) research task was established to explore the application of intelligent methods for achieving increasingly higher levels of automation. This task is part of the Intelligent Controls & Diagnostics (ICD) element of the Information Technology Strategic Research (ITSR) project, within the Computing Information Communication Technology (CICT) program. A conceptual architecture, shown below, has been developed under which various methods for achieving the desired goals of health monitoring, situation awareness, and strategic and tactical maneuvering can be explored.

Hybrid Combustion Facility IVHM
Lead:  Scott Poll
 
Paraffin-fueled hybrid rockets are being studied at Stanford University and Ames Research Center (ARC). Studies at Stanford have shown that the combustion properties of paraffin are such that, if they scale as expected, it would become possible to build safe, clean burning rocket motors with performance comparable to conventional liquid and solid fueled rockets. Hybrid rockets, which typically use a liquid oxidizer (such as liquid oxygen) and a solid fuel (often a form of rubber), have traditionally been poor performers with limited applications because they required complicated grain geometry in order to achieve useful thrust levels. Researchers at Stanford have demonstrated that paraffin combusts at a rate of approximately three times that of conventional fuels, thus eliminating the need for complicated and inefficient grain geometry. In addition, the products of combustion, namely carbon dioxide and water, are harmless.  To evaluate paraffin as a fuel, a facility has been built at ARC that is a scaled up version of a bench-top test facility that is located in the basement of the Durand Engineering building at Stanford University.
 
The goal of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) is to provide onboard vehicle model-based diagnostics capability.  This will allow fast and accurate determination of faulty components should failures occur.  To this end, exploratory IVHM systems are being developed for the HCF that can be used to gauge the advantages/disadvantages of different IVHM packages. 
 

 
Honeywell IVHM under the Space Launch Initiative Program
Lead:  Ann Patterson-Hine
 
The NASA Space Launch Initiative (SLI) was formed to coordinate the development of the 2nd Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) architecture, with the focus on maturing technologies for 2GRLV and reducing the technical and business risks associated with developing regular space transportation. Code IC at Ames Research Center is contracted to work with Honeywell under Technology Area 5 (TA-5), the Integrated Vehicle Health Management Risk Reduction Program. The objective of this task is to assist Honeywell in the development of a core IVHM architecture.
 
SOFIA Advanced Diagnostic System
Lead:  David Iverson
 
The observation schedule planned for the SOFIA Airborne Observatory requires highly reliable and available systems.  The purpose of the Advanced Diagnostic System (ADS) is to help SOFIA achieve this ambitious flight schedule by monitoring SOFIA housekeeping parameters and automatically detecting failures and unhealthy system trends that may indicate an impending failure.  The ADS diagnostic component will assist in failure isolation to facilitate system maintenance.  Early failure detection and timely repair will contribute significantly to overall SOFIA availability and help to maximize successful science mission hours.
 
Autonomous Rotorcraft
Lead:  Dan Christian
 
The Intelligent Systems Program is sponsoring the development of an autonomous rotorcraft with a resulting flight test demonstration that illustrates the potential of the technology for NASA missions.  Long term project goals include the development of autonomous system capability for rotorcraft that emphasizes high-level mission planning and decision making and vision-based processing during flight, while ideally relying on only onboard resources. Further goals are to demonstrate this autonomous rotorcraft capability during limited/well-posed mission simulations.