Hiawatha OnBoard Electronic Sensing

The cause of most adverse situations during unmanned aerial system operation is system, subsystem, or component faults or failure which are caused by damage, degradation, or environmental hazards that occur during flight. The Hiawatha OnBoard Electronic Sensing System can unobtrusively monitor the electronic health of the unmanned vehicle in real-time, identifying and assessing the threat of any transient high stress events which can affect the ongoing health and safety of the system to prevent system failure or unsafe conditions. The system relies on identifying changes in unintended RF emissions and characterizing them using a hybrid of spectral quantification metrics and machine learning algorithms. Leveraging mature RF hardware, Nokomis will integrate and test machine learning algorithms capable of assessing emissions changes in real time identify imminent fault states caused by normal wear or stress events which cause temporary or permanent disability of the system. The system is envisioned to operate autonomously, alerting the operator or initiating countermeasures as needed. In Phase II, a prototype of the system will be built and tested supported by the following tasks: Collect system and subsystem RF emissions during different operational states including high-stress situations for development and testing of software algorithms Develop and integrate software modules including machine learning algorithms to assess data to identify signature and markers which indicate potential component damage or wear beyond expected use degradation Demonstrate system ability to autonomously distinguish between markers indicating normal system state, stressed state, and critical imminent failure Test and evaluate the performance of the prototype using actual UAS subsystems More »