SBIR-STTR Award

Athena Technology, Incorporated (Athena) in teaming with Honeywell Corporation, proposes to develop an affordable and survivable flight control system (FCS), based on integrated INS/GPS technology, capable of performing guidance, navigation and control functions for small launch vehicles. The proposed approach leverages Athena's patented and flight demonstrated fault-tolerant control (FTC) capability, and Honeywell's experise in control and navigation sensor hardware development and manufacturing. The overall system will provide real-time failure detection and isolation, and achieve "On-the-Fly" reconfiguration of the flight control system even in face of failures. Athena's approach uniquely achieves this with the design of only a few control design points, valid and stable over the entire operational envelope. The elegance of this design formulation produces robust and very small footprint control algorithms, resulting in efficient software maintenance, moderate computational requirements, and overall reduction in life-cycle cost.

In this Phase II SBIR project, Athena technologies proposes to continue development of its revolutionary "Miniature Flight Control System" (mFCS). The MFCS is an integrated solution that features a dual-CPU hardware configuration specifically optimized to take advantage of Athena's patented LTIzation control law design tools and our proven analytic redundancy algorithms. The integrated sensor/processor package is ruggedized to survive the launch vehicle environment. A target selling price of $20,000 (for the UAV and small missile market) to $50,000 (for launch vehicle market) makes the highly reliable mFCS an affordable solution for a range of users, missions, and vehicles. This architecture has a number of military and commercial spin-offs that are detailed in the body of the proposal. In Phase I Athena worked with Honeywell Defense Avionics to conduct architecture trade studies and develop a concept design. In Phase II Athena will work with Honeywell, Orbital Sciences corporation, and Aurora Flight Sciecnes Corporation to design, fabricate, and test a prototype system. An option is proposed under which Athena will deliver flight hardware and support a space launch demonstration.

Keywords:
Flight Control, Navigation, Ins/Gps, Fault-Tolerance, Launch Vehicles