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 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.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1993 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Advanced Airborne Test Instrumentation System (AATIS) was developed by the Air Force to satisfy its flight-test mission needs through the 1990s. The Common Airborne Instrumentation System (CAIS) is a tri-service development aimed at providing a common airborne data acquisition system for all DoD flight-test programs into the next century. Both AATIS and CAIS include ground support equipment which performs the primary functions of documenting the instrumentation system, generating and loading the telemetry data formats, and performing instrumentation system diagnostics. The AATIS and CAIS ground systems will each support both the AATIS and the CAIS airborne systems. The AATIS ground system also supports the older ATIS airborne systems. The approach taken by the two ground support systems is similar but the scope of functionality is larger in the AATIS ground system because it needed to respond to the more extensive ground support requirements of the Air Force users. This paper provides a brief description of both ground systems and discusses the issues of commonality and interoperability.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper provides essential requirements and describes some possible architectures of so-called Wireless Transducers Systems from the user’s perspective and discusses the application advantages of each architecture, in the airplane-testing environment. The intent of this paper is to stimulate discussion in the transducer user and supplier communities and standards committees, leading to increased product suitability and lower cost for commercial off the shelf wireless transducer products.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / PC based instrumentation and telemetry processing systems are attractive because of their ease of use, familiarity, and affordability. The evolution of PC computing power has resulted in a telemetry processing system easily up to most tasks, even for control of and processing of data from a very complex system such as the Common Airborne Instrumentation System (CAIS) used on the new Lockheed-Martin F-22. A complete system including decommutators, bit synchronizers, IRIG time code readers, simulators, DACs, live video, and tape units for logging can be installed in a rackmount, desktop, or even portable enclosure. The PC/104 standard represents another step forward in the PC industry evolution towards the goals of lower power consumption, smaller size, and greater capacity. The advent of this standard and the availability of processors and peripherals in this form factor has made possible the development of a new generation of portable low cost test equipment. This paper will outline the advantages and applications offered by a full-function, standalone, rugged, and portable instrumentation controller. Applications of this small (5.25"H x 8.0"W x 9.5"L) unit could include: flight line instrumentation check-out, onboard aircraft data monitoring, automotive testing, small craft testing, helicopter testing, and just about any other application where small-size, affordability, and capability are required.

Traditional flight test sensing applications require installation of not only the sensor but also supporting cabling and interfacing infrastructure. The cost of this supporting infrastructure increases when it must cross pressure vessel boundaries, extend long distances, or interfere with operation of the aircraft. The continuing cost and schedule pressures on flight test programs demand approaches that minimize installation complexity and reduce the need to modify the aircraft under test. Some emerging approaches have leveraged wireless techniques for data transmission but this can only be used in certain circumstances and does not address the problem of power distribution. This paper describes ongoing research into alternative sensing approaches that utilize a mix of video processing, distributed processing, and power harvesting to provide additional solutions.

The growth of network and distributed technologies in flight test instrumentation (FTI) has provided the benefits of flexibility, scalability, and compatibility with prevalent computing capabilities. However, to achieve these capabilities, the complexity of each piece of FTI and the overall system has increased dramatically. Even with systems composed of equipment from a single vendor, it is important to have management systems that provide the flexibility to adapt quickly to various system configurations and present unified information to the flight test users. The growth of network technologies and then standardized approaches such as iNET standards becoming accepted IRIG 106 standards is leading to the growth of multi-vendor systems. These multi-vendor systems further increase the need for rapidly reconfigurable management systems. This paper describes a constraints engine we have developed to enable flexible system management systems and reflects on how these techniques have been used successfully in the iNET System Manager.

Configuring flight test systems can be a complex process due to the large number of choices that must be made. Making these choices requires system knowledge to build a working configuration in an efficient and timely manner. Historically, flight test systems have embedded this system knowledge in code. The limitation with these approaches is that any change or addition to the system knowledge is costly due to the significant work required to update and maintain the software. We see the philosophy of constraints as a promising path toward addressing these issues. In the context of flight test configuration, a set of constraints defines the limits of how a system may be configured to perform specific tasks. This paper describes an approach for simplifying configuration by moving the system knowledge out of hardcoded business rules and into a flexible architecture that leverages constraints for validation of system configurations.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In a study sponsored by the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB, California, Toyon Research Corporation, Goleta, California, demonstrated that shaped pattern antennas could be used to mitigate interference caused by telemetry signals on GPS systems. Using a technique for fixed reception pattern antenna (FRPA) design, Toyon built and tested a GPS antenna that minimizes reception of telemetry signals from a known location.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / A few years ago XidML was introduced as an open XML standard for capturing the meta-data associated with flight test instrumentation (FTI). This meta-data schema was broken down into elements for Parameter (name, range, units, offset-binary), Instrument (name, serial number, misses-to loss), Package (bits per word, words per minor-frame, rate) and Link (name, type) and so on. XidML remains one of the only published schema for FTI meta-data and with XidML 3.0 many simplifications have been introduced along with support for nested tree structures and a single instrument schema allowing anyone to define the validation for instruments from any vendor. This paper introduces the XidML schema and describers the benefits of XidML 3.0 in particular. It begins by giving a brief description of what XidML is and describes its history and motivation. The paper then outlines the main differences between XidML-3.0 and earlier versions, and how the XidML schema has been further refined to meet the challenges faced by the FTI community. As an example of usage the FTIManager software developed at Eurocopter will be briefly presented in order to illustrate the XidML ability to describe a multi-vendor FTI configuration.