The potential benefits from the successful completion of this program are enormous and will significantly impact the way critical aerospace and other systems are designed and operated. Examples of key customers that could benefit through use of the developed technologies include: unmanned air vehicles, JSF, future combat systems, commercial airlines, land and marine propulsion systems, industrial actuation systems, and robotic applications. Particularly, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Rolls-Royce have specific requirements on health management performance for which the fault tolerant technologies can provide value. Also, the prognostics-enhanced hovercraft control will be of great interest to OEMs. Impact has existing contracts with all these potential customers and has an excellent commercialization record. The development of the proposed proactive fault-tolerant control (FTC) system will directly contribute to NASA's IVHM and IRAC efforts. The proposed technologies are generic in nature and are also applicable to Crew Exploration Vehicle, Reusable Launch Vehicles, aircraft, Unmanned Air Vehicles and future generation general aviation platforms, leading to benefits in the form of improved reliability, maintainability, and survivability of safety-critical aerospace systems. The long-term implications of a successful completion of this program are significant: We will provide a bridge between PHM/IVHM technologies and advanced controls for aircraft systems. A lot of NASA's NextGen and current activities can take immediate advantage of these technologies. In short term, the hovercraft modeling and adaptive control algorithms to be developed in this program can be directly transitioned to some ongoing research work at the Prognostics Center of Excellence of NASA Ames and other centers. The adaptable nature of the control modules will allow it to act as a design and development tool for a wide variety of NASA applications including complementing Stennis Space Center's ISHM system.
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