PARAGON ROBOTICS LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF203-CSO1

Description

Armament maintenance and testing involves the use of numerous testing systems, each typically including a custom test harness connecting a system on the aircraft with a dedicated test workstation.  These test harnesses are often bulky and long, creating both safety concerns for airmen and contributing to huge sustainment costs.  By potentially replacing the much of these cables with a wireless point-to-point link, tremendous cost and usability improvements are possible.  Furthermore, by effectively incorporating "man-in-the-middle" hardware, additional features such as data recording or playback simulations could potential be added to any existing test system.  Future test workstations could also potentially interface directly with the wireless link components, eliminating the need for any custom test hardware. We have developed and commercially launched a wireless point-to-point input/output system (TRL 9) which could potentially address the current needs of the Air Force.  This system utilizes a proprietary cyber-secure wireless protocol using the unlicensed 900MHz band to seamlessly transmit any digital, analog, or communication signals between 2 devices (see Figure 1).  Each wireless link device can both digitize incoming signals (inputs) as well as recreate these same signals from a digitized stream (outputs), allowing full duplex signal communication across the wireless link.  This wireless system has primarily been utilized for industrial monitoring and control with both commercial customers and several DoD installations, and has obtained an Authority to Operate (ATO) with the Air Force for operation on the AFCEC COINE network enclave.  We propose to adapt this existing commercial wireless link solution for Air Force test harness application (DoD application maturity is currently at TRL 7). We are currently working with the Automatic Testing System (ATS) group on a SBIR project involving a wireless MIL-STD-1553 cable replacement, and anticipate being able to build off of this existing work for a general-purpose wireless device pair which could be used for armament testing as well as many other Air Force testing applications.