Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019 - 2

In This Issue -Technically
THE ADAPTIVE AVIONICS PLATFORM
We present a construction kit for avionics systems that are self-organizing, fault-tolerant,
scalable, operating-mode-aware, and almost configuration-free. Today's avionics systems are
distributed real-time computing networks and the state-of-the-art are Integrated Modular
Avionics (IMA). With IMA, computers, networks, and software are standardized and resources
are shared between system functions. Similar concepts exist in the cabin electronics domain.
While being beneficial in size, weight, and cost, the big challenges of standardized avionics are
their configuration and integration. The Adaptive Avionics Platform (AAP) is a concept for a
general-purpose avionics system that is self-organizing. During an organization phase, the AAP
discovers its topology, detects peripherals, distributes applications, and organizes communication paths without human interaction. Self-organization is enabled by a middleware and a publisher-subscriber message passing mechanism, both of which consider partitioning and a faulttolerance mechanism, which are mandatory for safety-critical avionics. Moreover, a generic
failure, redundancy, and operation mode managements significantly simplify the development
of avionics applications. The AAP concept is verified as an Adaptive Cabin Management
System (ACMS) in a lab demonstrator. The ACMS adapts its function automatically depending
on the number of computers, applications, peripherals, and topology; and provides various
single-failure fault-tolerance mechanisms.

ROBUST COOPERATIVE TARGET DETECTION FOR A VISION-BASED UAVS AUTONOMOUS AERIAL
REFUELING PLATFORM VIA THE CONTRAST SENSITIVITY MECHANISM OF EAGLE'S EYE
Autonomous air refueling is an important capability for the future deployment of unmanned
aerial vehicles, because it enables unmanned aerial vehicles to flight to overseas by extending
the range payload and an endurance time of aircraft. In this paper, a robust cooperative target
detection method inspired by the contrast sensitivity mechanism of eagle's eye is proposed,
which can steadily extract the cooperative target so that the markers can be detected more accurately and stably. Aiming at the docking phase of autonomous aerial refueling for unmanned
aerial vehicles, an integrated platform for verifying the visual measurement system was built
and tested. Experiments in two challenging lighting conditions are conducted, and the
experimental results verified the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed cooperative target
detection method and our developed visual measurement system.

MID-SEA AND LAND BASED WIND MEASUREMENT FOR TECHNOLOGY DEMONSTRATOR
Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) reusable launch vehicle-technology demonstrator
hypersonic experiment 01 (RLV-TD HEX 01) mission required precise and nearest to launch
atmospheric wind measurement for day of launch wind biasing (DOL-WB) during its ascent
phase as well as air data parameters for the guidance and control system during descent phase,
which are critical for the mission. The wind measurements were done using "Pisharoty GPS
Radiosonde system," indigenously developed by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre which is a
research center of ISRO. This paper describes the details of Pisharoty sonde system, its deployment and scheme for ascent and descent phase wind measurement. Typical measured values of
wind and sensor parameters are also presented in this paper.

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

MARCH 2019

Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2019