WILDCRAFT

TXT-sistemas_electronicos_comunicaciones-wildcraft

WILDCRAFT: WIreLess smart Distributed end system for airCRAFT

Proyect Overview

Financed by

European Union

Número de expediente: CS-GA-2012-01-GRA-323466
Programa: Seventh Framework Programme. Cleansky

Partners

Ceit-IK4
Integrasys

Summary

WILDCRAFT proposes the design, development and testing of a proof-of-concept demonstrator of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) aimed at applications in the aerospace industry. The continuous pressure on aircraft manufacturers to produce better and more secure aircrafts has led to increasing costs in maintenance and monitoring procedures that are being performed at given time intervals to assess the state of an aircraft. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) allow the continuous monitoring of critical variables of the operation of an aircraft, and as such they are able to issue early warning of a possible problem for immediate repairing.

WILDCRAFT is paying attention to data fusion techniques needed for obtaining an "abstract sensor" from the measurements taken by a multiplicity of sensors deployed in a specific part in an aircraft. To that end we are going to study the most suitable algorithms to infer, estimate or summarize the state of the physical variable being measured. The designed algorithms will be implemented in a FPGA platform. In WILDCRAFT we are also considering the safety critical nature of any on-board system in an aircraft.

The set of safety requirements of the system will be compiled and used for the specification, design and development of the building blocks of the system: sensors, energy harvesting, RF transceiver and microprocessor, and the corresponding levels of software and programmable hardware blocks.

Objetives

The project's objectives are:

To define an architecture for a WSN able to operate in an aircraft environment. Among the characteristics we are seeking for the WSN are:
- Range of communications between nodes must be at least the size of a typical aircraft.
- Worldwide deployment of the system. This is particularly important if RF communications are used.
- Flexible architecture that allows the installation of different kind of sensors with minimal changes (preferably, software changes)
- The definition of the architecture must take into account functional specifications applicable to the aerospace industry with regard to weight, RF emissions and power consumption.
- Low Power Consumption. Evaluate the impact of energy harvesting and power management in the total power consumption of the nodes.
The implementation of data fusion techniques at the sensor node will reduce the amount of data that need to be transferred within the WSN and therefore reduce bandwidth requirements, increase the immunity to interferences, allowing the possibility to reduce power consumption in the whole network.
To take into account the Safety Critical specifications imposed by the aerospace industry in the design of such a system. A risk assessment will be made to confront possible problems at all level of the device life cycle: design, validation and operation.
To develop a demonstrator of the WSN using several sensors nodes (temperature, strain gauges, vibrations) and one global computation unit that will gather and process the data obtained from the sensors in order to show the state of the aircraft's parts by presenting them in a unified way.
The final objective of WILDCRAFT is to serve as a fully automated way of inspecting the state of an aircraft structure and to achieve that it will be necessary to process a large amount of data in an intelligent way. WILDCRAFT will be using the inherent redundancy of WSNs to augment the overall fault tolerance of the system by employing data fusion techniques that can be implemented both at the node level and also at a global level to produce values that can be thought as a measure from an "abstract sensor" that represent the measures from all de WSN.