Architecture for Experimental Research and Operational Data Acquisition Control (AERODAC)

The Test and Evaluation (T&E) of new military and commercial hardware and software systems demand Data Acquisition and Control (DAC) resources capable of supporting the measurement, analysis and display requirements of these new systems. In order to ensure that the technology of the tools assessing performance is commensurate with the technology being evaluated, BAR has developed AERODAC, a reconfigurable software and hardware framework for test execution and data acquisition that is a fully customizable, scalable, cross-platform DAC solution. AERODAC leverages the real-time power of the EtherCAT protocol for deterministic hardware control & acquisition of critical data with the MATLAB platform for post processing, supervisory analysis and display activities. These two disparate technologies have been integrated into a seamless development environment using web-based tools allowing users worldwide to access data and control hardware. The Phase I effort will allow Bihrle Applied Research to engage in further discussions with AFRL/RQVX customers and discover additional stakeholders for its innovative data acquisition solution. As part of this discovery effort, a demonstration of AERODAC’s more advanced features will be provided.