Automated Health Monitoring for an Unmanned Helicopter

Overview

The Autonomous Health Monitoring System (“HealthMon”) software suite for the Boeing A160 Unmanned Helicopter was designed to reduce the personnel footprint required to conduct flight operations and expedite the approval of aircraft health for further flight tests. The software suite consisted of the following components that were tightly coupled across several platforms:

  • On-board embedded software (C++) that analyzed telemetry in real-time for faults and other noteworthy events.
  • Two Windows programs (C++/MFC) usable by flight test personnel to view detected events and suggested operational actions to mitigate these events when appropriate.
  • Post-processing analysis tools for fast reporting of detected events by automatically generating an event timeline with individual supporting plots.

Project Technical Details

  • Became project technical lead following initial software design phase, with focus on leading the software’s maturation from a developmental tool to a deployable program asset. Led team of 1-3 personnel in this capacity.
  • Scope of work encompassed entire software lifecycle, from design and development to test (including unit, integration, and regression testing in flight computer test network) and analysis.
  • Designed event detection algorithms by conducting telemetry data analysis to characterize aircraft health trends, faults, and states.
  • Established software release processes and quality enforcement, such as establishing software acceptance tests, preparing release information, managing builds, utilizing revision control tools, and tracking issues.
  • HealthMon system detected over 250 health events and accumulated over 200 engine hours and over 50 flight hours, with positive feedback from flight test personnel.

Publications

. Automated, Integrated UAV Health Monitoring System: Flight Test Case Study. AHS Unmanned Rotorcraft and Network Centric Operations Specialists’ Meeting, 2013.

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