International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Caterpillar Inc. has over 25 years of experience using instrument vans equipped with telemetry to support product testing. These vans provide the capability to instrument the product, to acquire telemetered data, and to analyze the data. They are being used in tests performed on construction and mining equipment at Caterpillar's proving grounds and at customer job sites throughout North America. This paper presents a design summary of the newest generation vans. It starts with an overview of the major subsystems and concentrates on the Caterpillar developed software that tightly integrates the various hardware and software components. This software greatly enhances the productivity of the system and makes it possible for the van to perform a large variety and quantity of tests required by our internal customers.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Telemetry format descriptions and engineering unit conversion calibrations are generated in an assortment of formats and numbering systems on various media. Usually this information comes to the central telemetry receiving/processing system from multiple sources, fragmented and disjointed. As present day flight tests require more and more telemetry parameters to be instrumented and processed, standardization and automation for handling this ever increasing amount of information becomes more and more critical. In response to this need, the Telemetry Definition and Processing (TDAP) system has been developed by the Air Force Development Test Center (AFDTC) Eglin AFB, Florida. TDAP standardizes the format of information required to convert PCM data and MIL-STD-1553 Bus data into engineering units. This includes both the format of the data files and the software necessary to display, output, and extract subsets of data. These standardized files are electronically available for TDAP users to review/update and are then used to automatically set up telemetry acquisition systems. This paper describes how TDAP is used to standardize the development and operational test community’s telemetry data reduction process, both real-time and post-test.

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / Northrop Grumman Corporation's B-2 Flight Test Instrumentation team is revamping its entire Data Acquisition System (DAS) to be an Ethernet based network (EBN) system that will provide simplified wiring, higher speeds, greater capacity, and control over the data. The old system became obsolete in terms of capability and maintainability. New on-board avionic systems also demand that the Flight Test Instrumentation group (INSTR) accommodate fiber and high speed Ethernet data. In addition, the footprint and location for INSTR systems and components will be moved to remote areas. INSTR engineering selected the Teletronics Technology Corporation's Ethernet networked Data Acquisition Units (DAUs), known as MnDAUs, as the core system. Prior to the first flight utilization of the new INSTR DAS will undergo extensive lab and field testing to assure flight test effectiveness and the accuracy of all necessary data products. The goal is to acquire and employ the best system available while avoiding costly lessons.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 23-26, 2000 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Wireless data acquisition began with sensors connected to some form of radio. Emergence of the IEEE 802.11 specification made possible the evolution of a high-speed, multi-channel, wireless data acquisition system using COTS, Commercial Off-The-Shelf, technology. After developing a sub-miniature telemetry system in the S-band for the US Air Force, the system delivered to the Air Force evolved into a high-speed, wireless data acquisition system for the commercial market.

The purpose of this research work is to demonstrate the feasibility of creating a quick response decision platform for middle management in industry. It utilises the strengths of current, but more importantly creates a leap forward in the theory and practice of Supervisory and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Discrete Event Simulation and Modelling (DESM). The proposed research platform uses real-time data and creates an automatic platform for real-time and predictive system analysis, giving current and ahead of time information on the performance of the system in an efficient manner. Data acquisition as the backend connection of data integration system to the shop floor faces both hardware and software challenges for coping with large scale real-time data collection. Limited scope of SCADA systems does not make them suitable candidates for this. Cost effectiveness, complexity, and efficiency-orientation of proprietary solutions leave space for more challenge. A Flexible Data Input Layer Architecture (FDILA) is proposed to address generic data integration platform so a multitude of data sources can be connected to the data processing unit. The efficiency of the proposed integration architecture lies in decentralising and distributing services between different layers. A novel Sensitivity Analysis (SA) method called EvenTracker is proposed as an effective tool to measure the importance and priority of inputs to the system. The EvenTracker method is introduced to deal with the complexity systems in real-time. The approach takes advantage of event-based definition of data involved in process flow. The underpinning logic behind EvenTracker SA method is capturing the cause-effect relationships between triggers (input variables) and events (output variables) at a specified period of time determined by an expert. The approach does not require estimating data distribution of any kind. Neither the performance model requires execution beyond the real-time. The proposed EvenTracker sensitivity analysis method has the lowest computational complexity compared with other popular sensitivity analysis methods. For proof of concept, a three tier data integration system was designed and developed by using National Instruments’ LabVIEW programming language, Rockwell Automation’s Arena simulation and modelling software, and OPC data communication software. A laboratory-based conveyor system with 29 sensors was installed to simulate a typical shop floor production line. In addition, EvenTracker SA method has been implemented on the data extracted from 28 sensors of one manufacturing line in a real factory. The experiment has resulted 14% of the input variables to be unimportant for evaluation of model outputs. The method proved a time efficiency gain of 52% on the analysis of filtered system when unimportant input variables were not sampled anymore. The EvenTracker SA method compared to Entropy-based SA technique, as the only other method that can be used for real-time purposes, is quicker, more accurate and less computationally burdensome. Additionally, theoretic estimation of computational complexity of SA methods based on both structural complexity and energy-time analysis resulted in favour of the efficiency of the proposed EvenTracker SA method. Both laboratory and factory-based experiments demonstrated flexibility and efficiency of the proposed solution.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Flight test data acquisition systems have been widely deployed in helicopter certification programs for a few decades. A data acquisition system uses a series of strategically placed sensors to provide instantaneous status condition of the helicopter's components and structure. However, until recently, it has been difficult to collect flight test data from helicopter rotors in motion. Traditional rotor solutions have used slip rings to electrically connect fixed and rotating mechanical elements; but slip rings are inconvenient to use, prone to wear, and notoriously unreliable.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / The higher bandwidth capacities available with the adoption of Ethernet technology for networked FTI data acquisition systems enable more data to be acquired by the Data Acquisition Unit (DAU) from high-speed data busses, with higher channel densities, faster sampling rates, and sample resolution. Ethernet offers increased flexibility, interoperability, and simplicity in terms of the FTI system topology. However, the adoption of Ethernet has numerous implications for the design and operation of the DAU in terms of supporting network protocols for synchronization, configuration, and the transmission of the acquired data. This paper explores these issues and discusses the merits of adopting Ethernet.

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This thesis presents the design of an inertial measurement data acquisition system intended for use in sailboats. The variables of interest are 3-axis acceleration, 3-axis rotation, GPS position/velocity, magnetic compass bearing and wind speed/direction. The design focus is on low-cost micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) based technology and demonstrating the validity of these technologies in a scientific application. A prototype is constructed and submitted to a series of tests to demonstrate functionality and soundness of the design. These tests range from bench tests to full scale application. Contributions of this thesis include the novel application of inertial measurement unit (IMU) technology to a sailboat racing application, the integration of all instrumentation, creative ruggedised packaging and emphasising the use of low-cost commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology.