International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / Because all video compression schemes introduce artifacts into the compressed video images, degradation occurs. These artifacts, generated by a wavelet-based compression scheme, will vary with the compression ratio and input imagery, but do show some consistent patterns across applications. There are a number of design trade-offs that can be made to mitigate the effect of these artifacts. By understanding the artifacts introduced by video compression and being able to anticipate the amount of image degradation, the video compression can be configured in a manner optimal to the application under consideration in telemetry.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The technologies used for flight test are evolving. Trusted standards like CAIS and IRIG106 PCM are giving way to new “trusted standards” (and proven technologies/protocols) found in telecommunication and networking such as Ethernet, fiber channel, TCP/IP, UDP, ATM and so on. Currently there is $100Ms+ invested in CAIS and IRIG compliant equipment in the world. A key challenge in this evolution is to provide a reliable solution that allows the FTI engineer to immediately take advantage of these advanced technologies while protecting prior investment in equipment, knowledge, and resources during this transition. This paper presents an analysis of how to protect existing assets while still leveraging the power of the latest technologies. It looks at the characteristics of a “bridge” system, and suggests solutions for merging and linking data from and to different transmission protocols using data synchronization and deterministic data management cycles.

ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In principle, the requirements for a flight test data acquisition system for space testing (launch vehicles, orbiters, satellites and International Space Station (ISS) installations) are very similar to those for more earth-bound applications. In practice, there are important environmental and operational differences that present challenges for both users and vendors of flight test equipment. Environmental issues include the severe vibration and shock experienced on take-off, followed by a very sharp thermal shock, culminating (for orbital vehicles) in a low temperature, low pressure, high radiation operating environment. Operational issues can include the need to dynamically adapt to changing configurations (for example when an instrumented stage is released) and the difficulty in Telemetering data during the initial launch stage from a vehicle that may not be recoverable, and therefore does not offer the option of an on-board recorder. Addressing these challenges requires simple, rugged and flexible solutions. Traditionally these solutions have been bespoke, specifically designed equipment. In an increasingly cost-conscious environment engineers are now looking to commercial off-the-shelf solutions. This paper discusses these solutions and highlights the issues that instrumentation engineers need to consider when designing or selecting flight test equipment.

ITC/USA 2008 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fourth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 27-30, 2008 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper presents the Flight Test Instrumentation Manager Software application internally developed and used inside the Eurocopter Flight Test department. This fully integrated and user friendly tool covers the all management requirement for entire life cycle of the flight test instrumentation equipment and configuration, tracking all the main events: order, calibration, configuration, service and repair, final disposal. FTIManager serves as a central hub between the instrumentation team and the post processing and analysis teams.

ITC/USA 2006 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Second Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 23-26, 2006 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is developing a new launch vehicle to replace the Space Shuttle. The Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) will be a combination of new design hardware and heritage Apollo and Space Shuttle hardware. The current CLV configuration is a 5 segment solid rocket booster First Stage and a new Upper Stage design with a modified Apollo era J-2 engine. The current schedule has an Ascent Development Test Flight (ADFT-0) with a First Stage and a dummy structurally identical, but without engine, Upper Stage. The ADFT-0 test results will determine if there will be multiple ADFT flights. There will be a minimum of two test flights with a full complement of flight hardware. After the completion of the test flights, the first manned flight to the International Space Station is scheduled for late 2014. To verify the CLV’s design margins a developmental flight instrumentation (DFI) system is needed. The DFI system will collect environmental and health data from the various CLV subsystems’ and either transmit it to the ground or store it onboard for later evaluation on the ground. The CLV consists of 4 major elements: the First Stage, the Upper Stage, the Upper Stage Engine and the integration of these elements together. It is anticipated that each of CLV’s elements will have some version of DFI. This paper will discuss a conceptual DFI design for each element and also of an integrated CLV DFI system.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The Range Commanders Council "Flight Termination Systems Commonality Standard," RCC 319-92, has been written with the noble goal of providing "common design, test, and documentation requirements for Flight Termination Systems (FTS)." As is often the case with standards of any kind, the devil is in the details! The Army TACMS (ATACMS) Block II Flight Termination/Telemetry System design has been significantly affected by the constraints imposed by RCC 319-92 as well as by Lockheed Martin Vought Systems customers' interpretations of those constraints and requirements. Important system elements are discussed along with some of the engineering decisions made to achieve compliance and the rationale behind those decisions. It is hoped that this monograph will acquaint potential users of RCC 319-92 with some of the issues involved in achieving compliance.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper describes the development of a PC based IRIG tone generator and flight termination transmitter. The tone generator and flight termination transmitter card are part of a flight line test set. The test set has several PC based cards which include an S-Band telemetry receiver, a bit synchronizer, a decommutator, an encryption support card and the flight termination transmitter card. The test set can perform a complete end to end test of a weapon’s flight termination system prior to loading on an aircraft.

No description available.

This thesis reviews the applications of Kalman filtering estimation to the problem of target tracking. Both linear and nonlinear forms of Kalman filter are reviewed and models of target manoeuvre discussed. Manoeuvre adaptation schemes are examined to detect the onset and completion of manoeuvres. Target manoeuvre coordinates are also examined and a new target model proposed which significantly improves tracking performance. The new model includes turn rate estimation. The real-time implementation of tracking Kalman filters is also studied both for a simple processor and a multiple processor architecture. Tracking algorithms are coded in Parallel C and evaluated for speed and efficiency

In the last decades, the quadrotor has been used in many areas, and deigning an effective flight control algorithm for the quadrotor has attracted great interests in both control and robotics communities. This thesis focuses on the flight control of the quadrotor by using different methods: The extend Kalman filter (EKF) based linear quadratic regulator (LQR) method and learning-based model predictive control (LBMPC) method. Chapter 4 investigates the flight control of a quadrotor subject to the model uncertainties and external disturbances. We propose a LQR based tracking algorithm. However, the designed LQR controller is hard to be implemented because of the existing noises in the measured states. A modified EKF is then designed for the online estimation of the position, velocity and motor dynamics by using the measured outputs. From the experimental testing results, it is shown that the proposed EKF-based LQR control method solves the tracking problem of the quadrotor with less tracking errors than only using the LQR method. In Chapter 5, the tracking control problem of the quadrotor subject to external disturbances and physical constraints is studied. A model predictive control (MPC) based algorithm is proposed. To reduce the computational load, a modified prior barrier interior-point method is used to solve the quadratic programming (QP) problem. Nevertheless, the achievable flight performance by using the standard MPC algorithm is affected by external disturbances. A LBMPC algorithm is proposed for the disturbance rejection. From the simulation results, it is shown that using the proposed LBMPC algorithm have less tracking errors than applying the standard MPC algorithm. / Graduate