NASA awards SSCI contract for Collaborative Aircraft Planning System
January 22, 2009 by news
WOBURN, MA, January 22, 2009 – NASA today awarded Scientific Systems a Phase I SBIR contract to develop algorithms that could improve the safety and efficiency of the current National Airspace System by automating traffic and resource planning.
The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) strives to transform the existing National Airspace System (NAS) into the safest, most efficient system feasible. This proposal addresses the automated surface traffic and resource planning for the NextGen Airportal concept. Current system is primarily reliant on manual planning and human decision making with minimal computer support. The proposed Collaborative Aircraft Planning System (CAPS) will implement advanced evolutionary algorithms to achieve Airportal usage optimality in real-time while maintaining the required safety margins in aircraft separation and conflict resolution. CAPS will be designed to be flexible to accommodate future aircraft capabilities and equipage, modeling of arbitrary pre-requisite and post-requisite resource requirements, weather driven changes in Airportal constraints, and will be scalable to larger metro-plexes of multiple airportals while maintaining real-time planning capabilities. CAPS will also provide intuitive graphical operator interfaces with enhanced visualization and safety alert capabilities.
SSCI will leverage its expertise and past experience in implementing evolutionary algorithms for large planning problems in designing the CAPS software tool. Phase II will lead to a CAPS software package delivery that can be integrated with NASA’s FACET and ACES software for evaluation and demonstration.
The proposed effort directly supports the NASA Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen NGATS) and provides advanced algorithms and software tools to perform integrated NextGen Airportal traffic and resource management. Phase II deliverable software package will be designed to interface with the existing tools like FACET and ACES that NASA uses for analysis and evaluation.
FAA and other government agencies will benefit from automated Airportal resource and traffic management through improved throughput of the airports with minimal delays. Performance based automated traffic planning will also enable efficient and safe operations of diverse aircraft types including unmanned vehicles alongside commercial flights. Besides aerospace, the proposed algorithms and software can easily be generalized towards transportation, manufacturing, logistics and military resource and asset planning.
Being funded to do this work moves Scientific Systems closer to its goal of enabling intelligent autonomy for unmanned systems by developing one aspect of the “brains and nervous system” necessary for intelligent autonomy.
About Scientific Systems Company, Inc.
Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI) pioneers products and technologies that provide the intelligence for unmanned ground, air and maritime vehicles to autonomously and collaboratively accomplish missions in difficult environments. A leading developer of technology solutions for defense and industrial suppliers, SSCI is one of the top 20 recipients of Small Business Innovation Research awards in the U.S. and is recognized by the U.S. Navy and Army for its record of successful technology transitions. A privately held company based in Massachusetts, SSCI collaborates with a network of defense industry prime contractors and consultants, drawing on an accumulated investment of over $150 million in advanced research and development funding.
Contact:
Greg Moeller
(781) 933-5355 x295
gmoeller@ssci.com
U.S. Air Force awards SSCI contract to design adaptive flight control systems
January 22, 2009 by news
WOBURN, MA, January 22, 2009 – NASA today awarded Scientific Systems a Phase I SBIR contract to conduct research on adaptive flight control systems. Expanding SSCI’s partnership with key providers of defense technology, additional technical expertise for this effort will be provided through Boeing Phantom Works and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Design of effective adaptive flight control systems capable of accommodating highly nonlinear vehicle dynamics and large uncertainties is fundamental to the future advancement of aircraft development and design. For most aerospace applications nonlinear dynamics and uncertainty can either be inherent to the airframe design or induced from flight sustained upsets, damage and/or external hazards. Hence the proposed technique will find wide applications in flight control design for both commercial and military aerospace vehicles. In addition, effective adaptive control designs are directly applicable to guidance, navigation and control (GNC) problems in space exploration.
Efficient adaptive control system designs are applicable to a wide variety of engineering systems including general Unmanned Systems (aerial, ground, surface, underwater), robotics, automotive industry, process control, and power systems.
Being funded to do this work moves Scientific Systems closer to its goal of enabling intelligent autonomy for unmanned systems by developing one aspect of the “brains and nervous system” necessary for intelligent autonomy.
Contact:
Greg Moeller
(781) 933-5355 x295
gmoeller@ssci.com
SSCI awarded contract for Geolocation of RF Emitters
January 8, 2009 by news
WOBURN, MA, January 7, 2009 – Under Air Force SBIR topic F083-135, Scientific Systems has been awarded a Phase I contract to develop a radio frequency (RF) transmitter geolocation capability. Expanding SSCI’s partnership with key providers of defense technology, Raytheon Missile Systems will subcontract to Scientific Systems as part of this effort.
The program will produce a system for geolocating, associating, and tracking emitters associated with RF guided threats. The system opportunistically uses sensor measurements, enabling both improved geolocation, and applicability to a wide array of missions and sensor configurations. The system is designed to make use of existing and planned RWR hardware and, as such, incremental costs are kept low and there is a believable route to transition validated technology into practice.
Being funded to do this work moves Scientific Systems closer to its goal of enabling intelligent autonomy in unmanned systems by passively sensing available information which will help create actionable information that future unmanned systems could exploit.
About Scientific Systems Company, Inc.
Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI) pioneers products and technologies that provide the intelligence for unmanned ground, air and maritime vehicles to autonomously and collaboratively accomplish missions in difficult environments. A leading developer of technology solutions for defense and industrial suppliers, SSCI is one of the top 20 recipients of Small Business Innovation Research awards in the U.S. and is recognized by the U.S. Navy and Army for its record of successful technology transitions. A privately held company based in Massachusetts, SSCI collaborates with a network of defense industry prime contractors and consultants, drawing on an accumulated investment of over $150 million in advanced research and development funding.
Contact:
Greg Moeller
(781) 933-5355 x295
gmoeller@ssci.com