A Software Defined Radio based UHF Digital Ground Receiver System for Flying Object using LabVIEW

This study demonstrates the design and implementation of a software defined radio based digital ground receiver system using LabVIEW. In flight testing centre, command transmission system is used to transmit specific commands to execute some operation inside the flight vehicle. One ground receiver system is needed to monitor the transmitted command and monitor the presence of the command in air. The newly implemented ground receiver system consists of FPGA, RTOS and general processing unit. The analog to digital conversion and RF down conversions are carried out in high speed PCI extension for instrumentation express cards. The communication algorithms, digital down conversion are implemented in FPGAs. The communication system uses digital demodulation and decoding scheme and realised by NI PXI-7966R with Xilinx Virtex 5, SXT, FPGA. The performance of the receiver system has been analysed by linearity measurement of pre-amplifier Gain, Noise figure, frequency, power and also measurement of sensitivity. The results show successful implementation of the ground receiver system

An Autonomous Flight Safety System

The Autonomous Flight Safety System (AFSS) being developed by NASA s Goddard Space Flight Center s Wallops Flight Facility and Kennedy Space Center has completed two successful developmental flights and is preparing for a third. AFSS has been demonstrated to be a viable architecture for implementation of a completely vehicle based system capable of protecting life and property in event of an errant vehicle by terminating the flight or initiating other actions. It is capable of replacing current human-in-the-loop systems or acting in parallel with them. AFSS is configured prior to flight in accordance with a specific rule set agreed upon by the range safety authority and the user to protect the public and assure mission success. This paper discusses the motivation for the project, describes the method of development, and presents an overview of the evolving architecture and the current status

Design of a low-cost high speed data capture card for the Hubble Sphere Hydrogen Survey

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-105).This thesis describes the design and implementation of a low-cost high speed data capture card for the Hubble Sphere Hydrogen Survey (HSHS). The Hubble Space Hydrogen Survey was initiated in an effort to build a low-cost cylindrical radio telescope for an all sky redshift survey with the observational goal to produce a 3-dimensional mapping of the bulk Hubble Sphere using Hydrogen 21cm emissions. This dissertation ï¬ rst investigates the system design to see how each of the user speciï¬ cations set by the planning team could be achieved in terms of design decisions, component selection and schematic capture. The final design. AstroGIG, satisï¬ es the user speciï¬ cations by capturing data up to a full power bandwidth of 1.7GHz with an instantaneous bandwidth of ≤ 250MHz white maximizing the dynamic range. AstroGIG buffers, processes, stores and ï¬ nally transmits the data through a 4-lane PCI-Express interface to a standard PC where the majority of the processing is performed. The system implementation is then described where issues relating to the process of transforming schematics into a physical PCB, and HSHS integration are discussed. The design is veriï¬ ed through Hyperlynx simulations to give a high degree of certainty that physical implementation and production would be successful. Results from tests on the actual hardware characterizing the overall system performance are presented. Conclusions are drawn based on these results and suggestions for future work and design improvements are recommended

A real-time computer vision library for heterogeneous processing environments

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-70).With a variety of processing technologies available today, using a combination of different technologies often provides the best performance for a particular task. However, unifying multiple processors with different instruction sets can be a very ad hoc and difficult process. The Open Component Portability Infrastructure (OpenCPI) provides a platform that simplifies programming heterogeneous processing applications requiring a mix of processing technologies. These include central processing units (CPU), graphics processing units (GPU), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), general-purpose processors (GPP), digital signal processors (DSP), and high-speed switch fabrics. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a computer vision library in the OpenCPI framework, largely based on Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV), a widely used library of optimized software components for real-time computer vision. The OpenCPI-OpenCV library consists of a collection of resource-constrained C language (RCC) workers, along with applications demonstrating how these workers can be combined to achieve the same functionality as various OpenCV library functions. Compared with applications relying solely on OpenCV, analogous OpenCPI applications can be constructed from many workers, often resulting in greater parallelization if run on multi-core platforms. Future OpenCPI computer vision applications will be able to utilize these existing RCC workers, and a subset of these workers can potentially be replaced with alternative implementations, e.g. on GPUs or FPGAs.by Tony J. Liu.M.Eng

Intelligent Hardware-Enabled Sensor and Software Safety and Health Management for Autonomous UAS

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) can only be deployed if they can effectively complete their mission and respond to failures and uncertain environmental conditions while maintaining safety with respect to other aircraft as well as humans and property on the ground. We propose to design a real-time, onboard system health management (SHM) capability to continuously monitor essential system components such as sensors, software, and hardware systems for detection and diagnosis of failures and violations of safety or performance rules during the ight of a UAS. Our approach to SHM is three-pronged, providing: (1) real-time monitoring of sensor and software signals; (2) signal analysis, preprocessing, and advanced on-the- y temporal and Bayesian probabilistic fault diagnosis; (3) an unobtrusive, lightweight, read-only, low-power hardware realization using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in order to avoid overburdening limited computing resources or costly re-certi cation of ight software due to instrumentation. No currently available SHM capabilities (or combinations of currently existing SHM capabilities) come anywhere close to satisfying these three criteria yet NASA will require such intelligent, hardwareenabled sensor and software safety and health management for introducing autonomous UAS into the National Airspace System (NAS). We propose a novel approach of creating modular building blocks for combining responsive runtime monitoring of temporal logic system safety requirements with model-based diagnosis and Bayesian network-based probabilistic analysis. Our proposed research program includes both developing this novel approach and demonstrating its capabilities using the NASA Swift UAS as a demonstration platform