Z/I Imaging Corporation announced today at the International FIG XXII Conference in Washington, D.C. the release of its Airborne Sensor Management System (ASMS) for sensor management in photo flight operations. The ASMS combines the power of the Flight Management System (FMS) with selectable Sensor Control Modules (SCMs) for improving efficiency in photo flights. ASMS allows users to interface with and control a wide variety of sensors, such as the Digital Mapping Camera (DMC), RMK, LMK, RC30, T-AS, PAV30, POS/AV and various GPS receivers.
“The ASMS is a collection of hardware and software components that was designed to help our customers streamline their workflow,” said Eric Grigorian, Director Computational Systems, Z/I Imaging. “Not only does the ASMS physically pull all components together, it provides the tools to control the complete acquisition system.”
With ASMS, multi-sensor sensor hardware configurations are simplified by integrating various sensor interfaces into a single 2U rack-mountable enclosure. The ASMS hardware and software components include the Real Time Controller (RTC), as the base hardware platform for interface to various sensors at the physical layer, the Sensor Control Module, as the component designed for enabling protocol exchange with individual sensors and the ASMS Application Framework that contains the Flight Management System component and the user interfaces for each Sensor Control Module.
The RTC contains a microprocessor with the surrounding support devices and provides the functions within the system that must execute in real time or predictable time. Functions that require response in real time include triggering of the sensor at the closest approach to an exposure station, recording the GPS coordinates of the mid-point of the exposure and similar events. The RTC provides a single container within which to integrate all of the custom hardware aspects of a sensor management system. The hardware components and/or functions within the RTC include:
- The real time single board computer with its ancillary I/O subsystems
- The video frame grabber (interfaces with video camera
- Interface converter (converts the Ethernet interface between the RTC and the system controller to the various signals needed by other components within the system)
- A navigation quality GPS
