The recent successes of the uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) in U.S. armed forces missions raise the possibility for increasingly diverse roles for UAVs in future operations: reconnaissance, surveillance, tracking, cooperative search and attack, relay communications, target identification, navigational guidance, and more.Continue reading
Active Projectile Course Correction System (APCC)
The APCC system provides guidance and control (G&C) for a smart LFL Seeker projectile engaging a moving enemy target. The system consists of various algorithms for tracking targets, tracking projectiles, and providing guidance and control for projectile course correction.
The Active Projectile Course Correction System (APCC) initiative, funded by the U.S. Army’s TACOM-ARDEC, investigated the development of an APCC system that provides guidance and control (G&C) for a smart LFL Seeker projectile engaging a moving enemy target. The projectile is equipped with an on-board Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) staring sensor that provides target images for tracking, inertial sensors for projectile trajectory feedback, and side thrusters/diverters for projectile course correction. The LFL Seeker projectile is also spin stabilized; though spin provides stability to the projectile’s linear motion, it also poses the greatest challenge for the design and implementation of a G&C algorithm: the projectile motion that needs to be controlled—and the target motion that needs to be tracked—is in the inertial frame, while all on-board sensors and control mechanisms (diverters) are in the non-inertial rotating frame.
Mission Planning & Operation Director (M-POD)
The goal of this initiative, funded by the Air Force and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, was to develop a novel, radical approach for mission planning and operation that uses principles of dynamic inversion and constraint orthogonal polynomial basis (COPB) functions for solving a two-point boundary value problem for a non-flat (under-actuated) non-linear differential equation of motion. The Mission Planning and Operation Director (M-POD) for Space Access Vehicles technology allowed mission planners to prepare a complete mission plan in a matter of hours instead of months.
Agile, Wireless-Enabled Workflows for Ship Manufacturing & Repair (AWSM™)
The AWSM™ technology represents a new paradigm for ship manufacturing that redesigns manufacturing processes and uses computing and wireless technologies to deliver information–activity statuses, resource availability, design and scheduling changes–to every user, work crew, or process involved in the project.
A central challenge in any large-scale manufacturing environment is to effectively adjust to production and procurement glitches that ripple across and continually threaten manufacturing schedules. The ship manufacturing industry is no exception. With manufacturing projects that stretch over years and involve numerous divisions, materials, facilities, and manpower, how can U.S. shipyards achieve the kind of proactive flexibility needed to develop and maintain the most efficient and cost-effective production schedules?
Intelligent Asset Tracking & Management System (IATMS)
IATMS is a unified framework for geolocation knowledge that provides instant visualization of MRO assets, improving asset utilization and scheduling and MRO flow-times. IATMS also provides knowledge discovery for equipment task and resource relationships using geolocation and other data sources.
The Air Force’s Tinker Air Force Base (TAFB), Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center (OC-ALC) and the Hill Air Force Base (HAFB), Ogden Air Logistics Center (OO-ALC) are responsible for the maintenance, repair, and overhaul of billions of dollars worth of aircraft each year. In addition to the actual nuts and bolts work on aircraft, a significant undertaking in itself, MRO activities involve the coordinated planning, scheduling, and moving of not only the aircraft, but also the thousands of pieces of ground support equipment (GSE) and other assets used in MRO work. At Tinker, more than 3500 items, ranging from huge cranes and air-conditioners to wrenches and drills, are required for MRO work that is spread over an area the size of a small city. MRO planning and coordination is a tightly orchestrated endeavor: aircraft, parts, and GSE required for each step, large items that can be difficult and time consuming to stage and deploy, must be in place when and where they are needed and must accommodate the requirements of other ongoing MRO work. A lag at any step in the schedule—the result of movement conflicts or double scheduled GSE, for example—can have a ripple effect, impacting other downstream MRO work and leading to missed deadlines, snowballing cost overruns, and, most significantly, compromised mission readiness.
Intelligent System for Abstraction & Integration of Instrumentation Hardware (ISAIIH)
ISAIIH is an XML-based language that acts as an intermediary between Instrumentation Support Systems (ISS) and the vendor-specific languages of leveraged systems. The Intelligent System for Abstraction & Integration of Instrumentation Hardware (ISAIIH) methodology was developed and documented with a focus on aviation Test & Evaluation (T&E). The effort was motivated by the requirement that current Instrumentation Support Systems (ISS) use vendor-specific languages in order to support the programming of instrumentation systems prior to testing and evaluation.
Framework for Intelligent Support of Smart Transducers (FIST™)
Test and Evaluation (T&E) at Edwards AFB involves collecting large volumes of data that must then be processed for display, analysis, and storage in the digital world of micro-controllers, processors, and computer networks. This data processing challenge is the focus of Edwards AFB’s development of a “smart transducer” framework that supports controller-to-transducer and transducer-to-transducer processing for their T&E operations. KBSI’s Framework for Intelligent Support of Smart Transducers (FIST™) initiative built a framework that allows for a plug-and-play capability for large-scale smart transducer deployments. The FIST™ technology exploits the inherent benefits of the smart transducer technology and revolutionizes the way in which flight test and instrumentation engineers design, implement, test and manage sensor networks.
Automated Rule Learning from Data Traces (TraceLogic)
The TraceLogic initiative is developing methods, processes, and algorithms to decipher the hidden rules or logic of complex flight operations aboard Navy aircraft carriers. The TraceLogic technology will help the Navy to better understand and address the technical and pragmatic problems associated with improving flight operation performance.
Operations on aircraft carriers have been described as “controlled chaos” that involve a complex, choreographed mix of flight-mission preparations, launch, recovery, and mission close-out operations. Critical activities take place on the hangar deck, the flight deck, and in the control center and these activities are performed by personnel with distinct roles, using mobile and fixed equipment, ordnance, and fuel. Missions are often in flux, and a single equipment failure can throw the entire plan of action into a tailspin.
Geospatial Three Dimensional Topology Model (3DTGIS)
3DTGIS provides an innovative 3D topology-based, non-manifold representation approach that enables the ability to integrate a solids modeling capability with COTS Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to improve battlefield decision making.
“Long experience indicates that, all else being equal, military practitioners and their civilian supervisors who purposely make geography work for them are winners more often than not, whereas those who lack sound appreciation for the significance of geography succeed only by accident.”
– John Collins, Military Geography: For Professionals and the Public
Raster 2D to 3D Drawing
KBSI developed technology that demonstrated the feasibility of delivering inexpensive 3D equipment models using COTS software and a KBSI developed 3D model generation technology integrated into a session manager. The R2 3D technology provides an inexpensive solution for creating 3D solid models from raster drawing.
Legacy data can be an asset or a liability, and managing it properly is important. For the U.S. Navy, the backlog of manual drawings was becoming a serious problem with respect to logistic support, as most engineering projects involved incremental changes to, or the re-use of, components in existing designs. Without technology to convert raster drawings to 3D product data models, this situation persisted for some time as over 50% of the new drawings were still being produced on paper. In an effort to find a solution to this dilemma, the Navy sought the help of KBSI. The result was the KBSI project entitled Raster 2D to 3D Drawing (R2 3D).