Available Technology

Distributed Asynchronous Air Vehicle Sensor System (DAAVSS) is a distributed system for sensing the environmental and structural conditions of an air vehicle. It consists of many identical sensor modules which can connect to each other as well as nearby sensors. The resulting network produces a robust, responsive system that can transfer structural and environmental information into actionable control objectives. The invention consists of a modular sensor system that distributes collection and computation throughout the aircraft body. Sensor Nodes are distributed throughout an air vehicle, either attached to the skin or to the substructure. These nodes are then connected to nearby sensor modules, from which they can collect data that they then either transmit to other nodes via a bidirectional data network or use to perform local computations. The internode network is sketched out in Figure 1, where each node can communicate with more than two other neighbors and can access N nearby sensors via a data network implemented with asynchronous mesh routing. Each sensor bus is local to the sensor node, so address space within each node's sensor bus is distinct. Allowing a node to connect with a minimum of > 2 neighbors ensures that the resulting internode network topology can take the form of a mesh rather than a traditional bus, and a single node failure is not likely to compromise the functioning of the whole multi-node system. The use of local computation could reduce the response time of the air vehicle and reduce overhead, since sensors no longer have to be wired through the entire vehicle to the central processor and polled from this source. Instead, local networks can inter-communicate and respond to stimuli directly without having to traverse the entire network. This invention is used to efficiently spread the computation required to collect and act on environmental and structural stimuli that act on an air vehicle.