An Affordable Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS) for UAVs

Impact Technologies, in collaboration with The Boeing Company and Lord Corporation, propose to develop an affordable and lightweight health and usage monitoring system (HUMS) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Based upon the requirements for UAV health monitoring investigated in Phase I, the Impact/Lord/Boeing team will re-design and mature the hardware/software concept, fabricate a prototype 3-lb unit, and fully demonstrate the capabilities by conducting realistic subsystem testing associate with a UAV such as the X-45 at Boeing. This will include embedding real-time health management algorithms for anomaly detection, fault classification and prediction into a newly designed COTS, aerospace-certified digital signal processing (DSP) based platform. Based on an analysis of the common and critical UAV subsystems, vital parameters related to UAV performance and mechanical health will be monitored to address condition-based maintenance activities that are required to ensure UAV mission success. Key UAV subsystems including the propulsion system, structures, actuators (fight control) and avionics that were the focus of Phase I will act as the core of the HUMS-UAV system development for this next Phase of the program. The Phase II prototype HUMS system will be designed to track the health of the UAV subsystems on-board using anomaly detection and diagnostic reasoning software that will also be capable of communicating the health status of the vehicle through a specified data transfer mechanism. The software will implement proven signal processing and automatic signal feature extraction techniques that are capable of identifying abnormal system behavior and reporting it to the diagnostic reasoning software. The development and integration of the advanced diagnostic and prognostic algorithms into a real-time health monitoring system is expected to improve UAV mission success rates and positively impact total ownership costs. The proposed Phase II development program includes a newly designed 3-pound hardware design that addresses the needs of unmanned programs such as J-UCAS. This work will leverage Impact's existing expertise in integrated vehicle prognostic health management (IVHM) systems, Lord’s expertise in flight-qualified electronics hardware and Boeing’s vehicle integration and design expertise.