Fusion of smart sensor standards and sensors with self-validating abilities

In airborne applications the high degree of reliability is required. Typical methods for assuring the reliability are development guides (DO178), testing, quality checking (AS9100) and certification processes. Despite these processes provide high level of safety and reliability of the products, the electronic devices can fail from different reasons. Also, one of the main present problems today is incompatibility of communication interfaces of so called smart sensors. This article proposes fusion of smart sensor standard IEEE 1451 and information necessary for sensor self-validation of sensor output. In this paper estimation of the feedback magnitude measured by an intelligent servomechanism system is presented. This system is being developed for a specific UAV application. The necessary data are saved within the TEDS memory of the extended IEEE 1451 standard. In the paper, following topics are discussed: methods of magnitudes validation and estimation, standards of smart sensors, the servo’s implementation and employment in an UAV project, algorithms and data stored in the TEDS memory.