Sensor Network for Air Vehicles

Aircraft currently fly based on coarse estimations of environment and aircraft state. Real-time measurements are traditionally restricted to laboratory environments (e.g. wind tunnel) due to the size and weight of instrumentation. NASA Ames has developed a distributed system for sensing the environmental and structural conditions of an air vehicle. It consists of many identical lightweight and low-power network modules that can connect to each other as well as to a number of different sensors of any type. The resulting network produces a robust, responsive system that can transfer structural and environmental information into actionable control objectives in real time.