Affordable, Flexible, Network Capable Application Processor for Data Acquisition and Processing

Several initiatives are currently underway in the Navy community to reduce ship total ownership costs thru sailor workload/manning reductions. A common vision behind these initiatives is to instrument future ships with thousands of distributed sensors,actuators, and application processors to automate tasks traditionally carried out by personnel. An immediate payoff of such highly sensorized platforms is that they relieve personnel from having to manually collect equipment data (and eliminatehuman-errors in the process). In addition, these networked systems hold considerable promise in addressing the Achilles-heel of manning reduction efforts: alleviating the sailors' damage control and maintenance responsibilities.We propose to develop a network-neutral processing and data acquisition platform that embraces open standards. The system will rely on a flexible modular design capable of processing signals from a wide variety of legacy sensors as well asstate-of-the-art