Development of a New Portable Test Station for Remote testing of Inertial Navigation Systems for Launch Vehicles

Abstract

Computer based test stations are inevitable part of every onboard avionic system development and qualification. Currently dedicated industrial computer systems were used for testing the inertial navigation system. They are customized integrated checkout systems that directly connect to the package through the MIL-STD-1553B bus. The movement of checkout along with the testing personnel was a laborious task due to its huge size. This paper describes the development of a new miniaturized portable test station for designer level tests of the navigation system with MIL 1553B interface. It provides a remotely controlled communication interface for testing, calibrating and programming the Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) with minimal movement of test station. It is a computer-based system with an intuitive graphical user interface and can be adapted to different families of processors with 16 or 32-bit word length. The new test station simplified the evaluation process and also the advantage of scalability of the checkout for future developments with new processors.