Autonomous Facility Health-Enabled Test Instrumentation, Phase I

The combination of smart devices and embedded metadata and networked (wire and wireless) technologies present real opportunities for significant improvements in reliability, cost-benefits, and safety for remote testing, performance measurement, and facility management. Adding robust and autonomous network protocol for routing will further simplify testing installation process and increase test facility reliability. However, the realization of a practical autonomous facility test system requires the synthesis of several technologies. One must bring together knowledge in the fields of sensors, data processing, distributed systems, and networks. Mobitrum proposes to develop "an autonomous facility health-enabled test instrumentation" for characterization and measurement of ground test facilities. The proposed device includes: (1) facility health-enabled sensor, (2) signal conditioning and analog-to-digital (digital-to-analog) conversion, (3) microprocessor, (4) on-board memory (e.g., Flash or EEPROM) for metadata storage and executable software, and (5) embedded network interfaces to create a powerful, scalable, re-configurable, and reliable distributed test instrument. Autonomous facility health-enabled test instrumentation is built upon an open-system architecture with standardized protocol modules easily to interface with industry standards.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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