Projects & Capabilities

Systems Integration & Test

  • Manned/Unmanned Aircraft System Integration

  • Flight Test Planning and Execution

  • Test Instrumentation and Analysis

  • Ground Control Systems

 Flight Test Support

On- and off-site ground and flight test engineering support of systems including novel airframes, avionics packages and payloads. Support is offered in varying roles: designing and executing test cards, debugging and resolving test issues, operating control software, and data review and reporting.

 

RF & Communications

Flight Test support for communications systems of high-altitude aircraft, including:

  • Data analysis of RF ground and flight test data

  • Development of simulations for expected RF performance.

  • Development of software and UI to parse and present relevant radio data to a test engineer

  • Support of future communications objectives such as BLOS and data backhaul.

Software Development

Software infrastructure development for UAS flight computers.  Primarily in VxWorks, this project included development in the OS kernel-space, application user-space and on the automated code generation tool-chain.

 

Alternative Power Generation

System design and integration of a 5kW hybrid power generation system for a moderate-altitude manned aircraft. This integration provides 5 kW continuous / duty cycles with excursions to 7 kW in an extremely long endurance application.

Design and build of a custom dynamometer including local density altitude compensation in support of testing.

Airborne Engine Test Stand

Design and integration of custom instrumentation package in support of customer’s airborne jet engine test stand. Involved system design, wire harnessing, system integration, and test UI mods.

Modeling & Simulation

Modeling and simulation of:

  • Combustion engines for throttle control of a varying load power plant in support of the development of closed-loop RPM controllers.

  • Pixel density, detection ranges, and pixel-to-angular offsets for aiming angles

  • Impulse / recoil estimation for a firearm

Cal Poly Optionally Piloted Aircraft

This project, led by California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), is the augmentation of a fixed-wing aircraft into an optionally piloted aircraft (OPA). The aircraft is a “laboratory in the sky”, serving as a test bed for student engineering projects. DCC supported the development, integration and test of the aircraft and Ground Control Station. Read more about the project here.

Machine Vision

Automating imagery harvesting and annotation to support training object detection and tracking models.  This tool set consumes un-prepared video and automatically harvests and annotates imagery.