The NASA SBIR product catalog

The purpose of this catalog is to assist small business firms in making the community aware of products emerging from their efforts in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. It contains descriptions of some products that have advanced into Phase 3 and others that are identified as prospective products. Both lists of products in this catalog are based on information supplied by NASA SBIR contractors in responding to an invitation to be represented in this document. Generally, all products suggested by the small firms were included in order to meet the goals of information exchange for SBIR results. Of the 444 SBIR contractors NASA queried, 137 provided information on 219 products. The catalog presents the product information in the technology areas listed in the table of contents. Within each area, the products are listed in alphabetical order by product name and are given identifying numbers. Also included is an alphabetical listing of the companies that have products described. This listing cross-references the product list and provides information on the business activity of each firm. In addition, there are three indexes: one a list of firms by states, one that lists the products according to NASA Centers that managed the SBIR projects, and one that lists the products by the relevant Technical Topics utilized in NASA's annual program solicitation under which each SBIR project was selected

Definition of avionics concepts for a heavy lift cargo vehicle, volume 2

A cost effective, multiuser simulation, test, and demonstration facility to support the development of avionics systems for future space vehicles is defined. The technology needs and requirements of future Heavy Lift Cargo Vehicles (HLCVs) are analyzed and serve as the basis for sizing of the avionics facility although the lab is not limited in use to support of HLCVs. Volume 2 is the technical volume and provides the results of the vehicle avionics trade studies, the avionics lab objectives, the lab's functional requirements and design, physical facility considerations, and a summary cost estimate

Modeling Adaptive Middleware and Its Applications to Military Tactical Datalinks

Open systems solutions and techniques have become the de facto standard for achieving interoperability between disparate, large-scale, legacy software systems. A key technology among open systems solutions and techniques is middleware. Middleware, in general, is used to isolate applications from dependencies introduced by hardware, operating systems, and other low-level aspects of system architectures. While middleware approaches are or will be integrated into operational military systems, many open questions exist about the appropriate areas to applying middleware. Adaptive middleware is middleware that provides an application with a run-time adaptation strategy, based upon system-level interfaces and properties. Adaptive middleware is an example of an active applied research area. Adaptive middleware is being developed and applied to meet the ever-increasing challenges set forth by the next generation of mission-critical distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. The driving force behind many next-generation DRE systems is the establishment of QoS requirements typically associated with workloads that vary dynamically. The Weapon System Open Architecture (WSOA), an adaptive middleware platform developed by Boeing, is modeled as a part of this research to determine the scalability of the architecture. The WSOA adaptive middleware was previously flight-tested with one tactical node, and the test results represent the performance baseline the architecture. The WSOA adaptive middleware is modeled with 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 tactical nodes. The results of the modeling and simulation is that the WSOA adaptive middleware can achieve the performance baseline achieved during the original flight-test, in the cases of 1, 2, and 4 tactical nodes. In addition, the results of the modeling and simulation also demonstrate that the WSOA adaptive middleware cannot achiev

Embedded System Design

A unique feature of this open access textbook is to provide a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental knowledge in embedded systems, with applications in cyber-physical systems and the Internet of things. It starts with an introduction to the field and a survey of specification models and languages for embedded and cyber-physical systems. It provides a brief overview of hardware devices used for such systems and presents the essentials of system software for embedded systems, including real-time operating systems. The author also discusses evaluation and validation techniques for embedded systems and provides an overview of techniques for mapping applications to execution platforms, including multi-core platforms. Embedded systems have to operate under tight constraints and, hence, the book also contains a selected set of optimization techniques, including software optimization techniques. The book closes with a brief survey on testing. This fourth edition has been updated and revised to reflect new trends and technologies, such as the importance of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and the Internet of things (IoT), the evolution of single-core processors to multi-core processors, and the increased importance of energy efficiency and thermal issues

Radio Resource Management for Satellite UMTS. Dynamic scheduling algorithm for a UMTS-compatible satellite network.

The third generation of mobile communication systems introduce interactive Multicast and Unicast multimedia services at a fast data rate of up to 2 Mbps and is expected to complete the globalization of the mobile telecommunication systems. The implementation of these services on satellite systems, particularly for broadcast and multicast applications to complement terrestrial services is ideal since satellite systems are capable of providing global coverage in areas not served by terrestrial telecommunication services. However, the main bottleneck of such systems is the scarcity of radio resources for supporting multimedia applications which has resulted in the rapid growth in research efforts for deriving efficient radio resource management techniques. This issue is addressed in this thesis, where the main emphasis is to design a dynamic scheduling framework and algorithm that can improve the overall performance of the radio resource management strategy of a UMTS compatible satellite network, taking into account the unique characteristics of wireless channel conditions. This thesis will initially be focused on the design of the network and functional architecture of a UMTS -compatible satellite network. Based on this architecture, an effective scheduling framework is designed, which can provide different types of resource assigning strategies. A functional model of scheduler is defined to describe the behaviours and interactions between different functional entities. An OPNET simulation model with a complete network protocol stack is developed to validate the performance of the scheduling algorithms implemented in the satellite network. Different types of traffic are considered for the OPNET simulation, such as the Poisson Process, ONOFF Source and Self Similar Process, so that the performance of scheduling algorithm can be analyzed for different types of services. A novel scheduling algorithm is proposed to optimise the channel utilisation by considering the characteristics of the wireless channel, which are bursty and location dependent. In order to overcome the channel errors, different code rates are applied for the user under different channel conditions. The proposed scheduling algorithm is designed to give higher priority to users with higher code rate, so that the throughput of network is optimized and at the same time, maintaining the end users¿ service level agreements. The fairness of the proposed scheduling algorithm is validated using OPNET simulation. The simulation results show that the algorithm can fairly allocate resource to different connections not only among different service classes but also within the same service class depending on their QoS attributes.Inmarsat Global Ltd. BGAN and the European Space Agency (ESA

Medium Access Control Layer Implementation on Field Programmable Gate Array Board for Wireless Networks

Triple play services are playing an important role in modern telecommunications systems. Nowadays, more researchers are engaged in investigating the most efficient approaches to integrate these services at a reduced level of operation costs. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) boards have been found as the most suitable platform to test new protocols as they offer high levels of flexibility and customization. This thesis focuses on implementing a framework for the Triple Play Time Division Multiple Access (TP-TDMA) protocol using the Xilinx FPGA Virtex-5 board. This flexible framework design offers network systems engineers a reconfigiirable platform for triple-play systems development. In this work, MicorBlaze is used to perform memory and connectivity tests aiming to ensure the establishment of the connectivity as well as board’s processor stability. Two different approaches are followed to achieve TP-TDMA implementa­tion: systematic and conceptual. In the systematic approach, a bottom-to-top design is chosen where four subsystems are built with various components. Each component is then tested individually to investigate its response. On the other hand, the concep­tual approach is designed with only two components, in which one of them is created with the help of Xilinx Integrated Software Environment (ISE) Core Generator. The system is integrated and then tested to check its overall response. In summary, the work of this thesis is divided into three sections. The first section presents a testing method for Virtex-5 board using MicroBlaze soft processor. The following two sections concentrate on implementing the TP-TDMA protocol on the board by using two design approaches: one based on designing each component from scratch, while the other one focuses more on the system’s broader picture

Component-based control system development for agile manufacturing machine systems

It is now a common sense that manufactures including machine suppliers and system integrators of the 21 st century will need to compete on global marketplaces, which are frequently shifting and fragmenting, with new technologies continuously emerging. Future production machines and manufacturing systems need to offer the "agility" required in providing responsiveness to product changes and the ability to reconfigure. The primary aim for this research is to advance studies in machine control system design, in the context of the European project VIR-ENG - "Integrated Design, Simulation and Distributed Control of Agile Modular Machinery"

2010 Exhibitors

Listings and Descriptions of 2010 Small Satellite Conference Exhibitor

Embedded System Design

A unique feature of this open access textbook is to provide a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental knowledge in embedded systems, with applications in cyber-physical systems and the Internet of things. It starts with an introduction to the field and a survey of specification models and languages for embedded and cyber-physical systems. It provides a brief overview of hardware devices used for such systems and presents the essentials of system software for embedded systems, including real-time operating systems. The author also discusses evaluation and validation techniques for embedded systems and provides an overview of techniques for mapping applications to execution platforms, including multi-core platforms. Embedded systems have to operate under tight constraints and, hence, the book also contains a selected set of optimization techniques, including software optimization techniques. The book closes with a brief survey on testing. This fourth edition has been updated and revised to reflect new trends and technologies, such as the importance of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and the Internet of things (IoT), the evolution of single-core processors to multi-core processors, and the increased importance of energy efficiency and thermal issues