A Distributed Sensor Architecture For Advanced Aerospace Systems

The Distributed Sensor Architecture (DSA) has been developed to couple knowledge-based processing with integrated sensors technology to provide coherent and efficient treatment of information generated by multiple sensors. In this architecture multiple smart sensors are serviced by a knowledge-based sensor supervisor to process sensor-related data as an integrated sensor group. Multiple sensor groups can be combined to form a reconfigurable, fault tolerant sensor fusion framework. The role and topology of this architecture are discussed. An example application of DSA sensor data fusion is presented.