Airborne Research Test System, Fourth Generation (ARTS IV)

Airborne Research Test System,

Fourth Generation (ARTS IV)

ARTS IV is a hardware and software platform for testing advanced control and sensor concepts on Armstrong's Full-Scale Advanced Systems Testbed (FAST). ARTS IV reduces the effort and cost of flight testing research by providing a robust, flexible, reconfigurable computing platform for hosting research experiments. The software architecture

of ARTS IV provides the ability to host multiple research experiments simultaneously and allows researchers to reconfigure the software to meet various mission needs.

Work to date: The ARTS platform has been used to investigate a number of ground-breaking control technologies with potential to revolutionize how air and space vehicles are controlled and how human operators interact with them. Specifically, the benefits of simple adaptive control architectures have been explored for improving the robustness and safety of commercial aircraft.

Looking ahead: Current research is focused on enabling lighter weight structures and addressing one of the boundaries to a number of novel control approaches through the use of structural load feedback within an optimal control architecture.

Partner: ARTS IV was developed in collaboration with the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation.

Benefits

 Flexible: Provides an array of options to test and implement advanced control concepts

 Configurable: Can be quickly customized for various experiments

 Partitioned: Separates research experiments from the core system, allowing research to be changed without re-performing formal testing of the core ARTS IV software

Applications

 Validating new flight control concepts  Expanding aircraft envelope

 Testing aircraft limits

Avionics and Instrumentation Technologies

Armstrong innovators design and integrate data acquisition systems for research, support, and one-of-a-kind platforms. In many cases, these systems leverage commercial off-the-shelf parts to keep costs low and ease integration with legacy systems. At the same time, these cutting-edge data systems are finding innovative ways not only to collect data efficiently but also to flexibly configure collection parameters.

Designed for aerospace applications, many of these innovations can benefit numerous industries in a variety of situations where data optimization is critical, such as manufacturing operations, business processes, and energy management, to name a few.