Prognostic & Health Management (PHM) Technologies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)Optimized PHM System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Sentient will adapt its existing prognostics and health management software and architecture, called SAGE, to Navy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). SAGE is particularly well-suited for UAVs because it already incorporates a centralized architecture, where data storage, signal processing, data management and visualization, higher level reasoning, prognostics, and maintenance and logistics coordination are all performed at a central ground control station. This centralized architecture minimizes on-board data storage and processing, and thus greatly reduces the amount of required on-board hardware. Substantial diagnostic coverage will be achieved through a network of existing UAV sensors. This suite of existing UAV sensors will be augmented as necessary with other diagnostic sensors. Through incorporating our other proprietary signal processing technology called “VSP” we will identify faults earlier than possible with other methods. Our physics of failure algorithms will be applied to provide long time-horizon prediction of component reliability. Long time-horizon predictions are required for UAVs because they typically have mission lengths 5-10 times longer than those of manned aircraft.