Virtual Redundancy for Safety Assurance in the Presence of Sensor Failures

Barron Associates has been awarded a Phase II SBIR contract to develop “Real-time Sensor Integrity Management” technology.  Sensor failures are a major flight safety hazard for all types of air vehicles, both manned and unmanned.  Even in vehicles with extensive hardware redundancy, common-mode failures can lead to losses of critical state feedback information, which in turn can lead to automation failures and loss of situational awareness on the part of a human pilot.  The technology developed by Barron Associates will fuse information from all available physical sensors and models of vehicle dynamics to identify sensors that have failed, and to compute a virtual sensor output signal to replace failed physical sensors. The result will be improved safety of flight for both manually piloted and automated vehicles.