lightweight, low power, sensors for locating aerospace ground equipment and other maintenance assets over wide areas in an industrial environment

TECHNOLOGY AREA(S): Sensors
OBJECTIVE: Develop and demonstrate a sensor system technology capable of tracking aerospace ground equipment and other maintenance assets over areas of up to 3 square-kilometers while offering lower size, weight, and power (SWaP) than existing RFID solutions. Ideall
DESCRIPTION: Aircraft heavy maintenance requires an array of powered and non-powered mobile ground support equipment ranging in character from power generators to maintenance stands. It is essential that this equipment be tracked, maintained, and accounted for in order to ensure their availability for use in a dynamic aircraft maintenance environment. Therefore, there is a need to track this equipment's location across the flight line and maintenance industrial area.
Existing RFID technology has been implemented to track the location of these assets. However, due to the wide area over which they are used, active RFID was implemented, which requires replaceable batteries for each RFID tag. This creates a maintenance burden to replace batteries in each piece of equipment being tracked. Inevitably, these batteries are not replaced often enough to keep the system functioning reliably. As a result, some assets are difficult to locate and regularly miss required inspection and maintenance intervals.
An alternative sensor technology is sought that is low cost, low power, lightweight, and operate over a range of at least 3 kilometers. The sensor must be able to operate indefinitely, requiring no battery replacement. The sensor must be able to be placed onto metal surfaces with no performance degradation and the system should be able to locate the sensor within inches. To minimize cost of deployment and maintenance burden, a relatively low number of readers should be required over a 3 kilometer square area. The system must operate on existing free and public frequency bands in the United States.
PHASE I: Demonstrate a proof of concept sensor and demonstrate location detection range and accuracy.
PHASE II: Develop a prototype location sensor system for aerospace ground equipment suitable for demonstration in an industrial environment. This system must keep a log of location, dwell time, and date ranges of where equipment resides at their various points of usage and rest.
PHASE III: Deploy the sensor solution to track the location of aerospace ground equipment in the Air Force air logistics complex environment.
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