ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper presents an approach to development of generic ground systems to be used for spacecraft testing and operations. This method makes use of a standard modeling method, which enables virtualization of spacecraft. By virtualizing spacecraft, development of generic systems that are applicable to different spacecraft becomes possible even if spacecraft themselves are not standardized. This is because systems can utilize (1) a standard database that can store information on any virtual spacecraft and (2) standard software tools that can be used for any virtual spacecraft. This paper explains the concept of virtualization of spacecraft, introduces the standard model used for virtualization of spacecraft, shows how to manipulate virtual spacecraft with software tools, and presents the core elements of generic ground systems.

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 / As part of a project to develop small satellites, we have developed a combined ground station and flight computer control software package using LabVIEW. These computer systems are used to acquire data from sensors, control communications links, provide automatic data acquisition capabilities, and provide a user interface. In this paper, we will look at the state machines that describe both sets of software, the challenges for the flight computer development given the PC/104 format, and show how the final product was deployed.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1993 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper will describe the effort to provide a common telemetry system for the Control Center Complex (CCC) which will process data from both the space shuttle and the space station vehicles. It is being developed for the manned spaceflight program at Johnson Space Center. Space shuttle uses a traditional Inter-Range Instrumentation Group (IRIG) telemetry format and Space Station Freedom utilizes the more recently developed Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) standards for packet-based telemetry Although the two telemetry streams are very different in structure, a front end system is being developed which will isolate the differences and provide a common data format to the downstream elements of the control center. Because of this, a CCC workstation could receive and process data from either space station or space shuttle or both using a identical set of workstation program tools. The generic telemetry front end processor, which is called the Consolidated Communications Facility (CCF), will not only provide a cost effective method of processing space shuttle and space station data, but also will position the CCC to support anticipated requirements of' future programs. The development goals for the CCC are to reduce development and sustaining costs. In the CCF project, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment is stressed to allow modular maintenance. In addition, the project has emphasized the development of a automated features in the telemetry stream selection and processing which reduce the amount of operator attention needed. The system has been designed to include robotics in the recording operation and artificial intelligence for detecting faults. This paper will review the concept development for processing telemetry and outline the architecture of the front end CCF project. It will discuss the goals and major influences on the design, and provide a status on the development. Ability of the current COTS marketplace to meet the goals will be discussed. In summation, this paper will describe generic telemetry processing in the context of the CCC being built at Johnson Space Center.

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 / As part of a project to develop small satellites, we have developed a combined ground station and flight computer that use IP-based networking for the command and telemetry data communications. The network uses a private IP network between the payload and the ground-station. Commands are sent to the payload as UDP short message packets. Status and real-time telemetry are sent as UDP text strings. Production data are sent as files using a ftp-type of data exchange. Production data types include numeric data (sensor data) and JPEG-formatted picture data (full pictures and thumbnails). Details of the software used, challenges of making the system work over a low-quality radio link, and integration with the operating system will be discussed.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper presents a case study of the Western Range Centralized Telemetry Processing Subsystem (WR CTPS). This system was developed by Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems and Global Services and L-3 Communications Telemetry-West as part of the Range Standardization and Automation (RSA) IIA program. Requirements included real-time simultaneous acquisition of 16 PCM streams at rates of up to 30M bits per second; real-time processing; and data display on workstations connected over a gigabit Ethernet network. This system is designed for range safety and needs to be fault-tolerant while maintaining 100 percent data availability in the event of a single failure during an operation. The development of such a system demanded a rigorous Systems Engineering approach to ensure the successful upgrade and deployment onto the range infrastructure. This case study provides an overview of the system technical requirements and its architecture. The summary presents challenges encountered during the development and lessons learned while meeting them.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / During the recent years of small satellite space access missions, the trend has been towards designing low-cost ground control centers to maintain the space/ground cost ratio. The use of personal computers (PC) in combination with high speed transputer modules as embedded parallel processors, provides a relatively affordable, highly versatile, and reliable desktop workstation upon which satellite telemetry systems can be built to meet the ever-growing challenge of the space missions today and of the future. This paper presents the feasibility of cost effective, high performance ground systems and a quantitative analysis and study in terms of performance, speedup, efficiency, and the compatibility of the architecture to commercial off the shelf (COTS) tools, and finally, introduces an operational high performance, low cost ground system to strengthen the insight of the concept.

Les travaux de cette thèse adressent la problématique de la coopération aéro-terrestre pour la cartographie de l’espace navigable. La nécessité d’une carte pour la navigation et la planification de chemins pour les robots terrestres n’est plus à prouver. L’utilisation d’une coopération aéro-terrestre pour créer une carte navigable à destination du robot terrestre a plusieurs intérêts. Premièrement, le drone peut cartographier rapidement une zone grâce à son champ de vision étendu et ses capacités de déplacement. Deuxièmement, la fusion des cartes créées par ces deux agents permet de tirer le meilleur profit des deux points de vue : la cohérence de la vue aérienne globale et la précision de la vue terrestre locale. Pour répondre à cette problématique, nous proposons une méthode qui s’appuie sur la création de cartes hybrides et leur fusion. Les cartes sont construites en utilisant le squelette de l’espace navigable terrestre comme support d’un graphe contenant également des informations métriques locales de l’environnement. La mise en correspondance des cartes aérienne et terrestre s’effectue à l’aide d’un appariement point à point déterminé grâce à une mesure de dissimilarité appropriée. Cette dernière est définie pour répondre aux critères d’invariance et de discriminance dans ce contexte. La mise en correspondance est ensuite utilisée pour fusionner les cartes entre elles. Les cartes fusionnées peuvent être utilisées par le robot au sol pour effectuer sa mission. Elles permettent également de propager des informations telles que des coordonnées GPS à des robots et dans des lieux où ce dispositif n’est pas disponible. Des expérimentations en environnements virtuels et réels sont réalisées pour valider cette approche et en tracer les perspectives. / This work aims to study the problem of air-ground robotic cooperation for collaborative traversability mapping. The need for a map for navigation and path planning for terrestrial robots is no longer to be proven. The use of air-ground cooperation to create a navigable map for the ground robots has several interests. First, the drone can quickly map an area through its large field of vision and traveling capabilities. Second, the fusion of maps based on these two agents makes it possible to draw the best benefits from both points of views: the coherence of the global aerial view and the accuracy of the local ground view. To answer this problem, we propose a method that relies on the construction of a unified model of hybrid maps and their fusion.The maps are built using the skeleton of the traversability space as a support for graphs also containing local metric and potentialy semantic information of the environment. The maching of aerial and ground maps is done using a point to point correlation based on an appropriate dissimilarity measure. This measure is defined to meet invariance and discriminance criteria. The matching is then used to merge the maps into an augmented traversability map. The merged maps can be used by the ground robot to perform its mission. They also make it possible to deploy information such as GPS coordinates to robots in GPS denied environments. Experiments in virtual and real world environments have been carried out to validate this approach and map out future perspetives.