Unmanned Aerial Systems require intelligent control technology which must be able to adapt to different flight conditions and environments. Whether the system is able to effectively react to unforeseen events such as an impact is key to ensure their mission is carried out safely.

Real-time structural health monitoring can be useful to determine whether an impact has occurred, what the extent of the damage is, and how the control system should adapt to overcome these changes. One of the methods used to address this damage is measuring the resulting structural strain produced by the impact through the use of Strain Gauges. However, accurately measuring strain over the whole airplane structure at a high frequency is costly due to the sheer amount of data to be acquired and processed.

Here we show how a size, cost and power efficient high-speed data acquisition system was developed to read from more than 100 strain gauges at a sampling rate higher than 2kHz in a time-synchronized manner and send the realtime data to a main computer to be processed, as well as a method to find the proper strain gauge locations to optimize the number of sensors required for efficient data acquisition.

Daniel would like to thank his faculty sponsor Srikanth Gururajan for their support of this project.