Publications
An essential measure in promoting greater use of NASA technology
is letting potential users know what technologies are available
for transfer. This is accomplished primarily by the publication
NASA Tech Briefs.
A technician of Intelligent Vision Systems, Inc. conducts
a test of the company's TDS-200 Traffic Detection System. An
article in NASA Tech Briefs enabled solution of a major problem
with the TDS-200's sensory system.
The National Aeronautics and Space Act requires that NASA
contractors furnish written reports containing technical information
about inventions, improvements and innovations developed in the
course of work for NASA. These reports provide the input for
NASA Tech Briefs. Issued monthly, the free publication is a current
awareness medium and problem solving tool for more than 200,000
government and industry readers.
Each issue contains information on newly-developed products
and processes, advances in basic and applied research, improvements
in shop and laboratory techniques, new sources of technical data
and computer programs, and other innovations originating at NASA
field centers or at the facilities of NASA contractors.
An example of how NASA Tech Briefs inspires secondary application
of NASA technology is the experience of Intelligent Vision Systems,
Inc. (InVision) (InVision is a trademark of Intelligent Vision
Systems, Inc.), Houston, Texas, which ran into problems while
developing the TDS-200 Traffic Detection System. Designed to
monitor road traffic, the system consists of a series of pole-mounted
sensors that identify shapes (vehicles, pedestrians), detect
movement or the lack of it, count individual objects in their
respective lanes, and calculate their speed; information of this
type is important to highway control engineers. The problem that
surfaced during development of the system was the sensor's inability
to provide adequate image recognition in rain, fog or other bad
weather.
A pair of representative ICS oscillators manufactured by Integrated
Component Systems, Inc. The Tech Briefs publication gave the
company a lead to an improvement that has been incorporated in
the ICS line.
InVision president Paul Mayeaux credited NASA technology with
the breakthrough that solved the problem. He said: "After
three years of limited R&D success and dwindling enthusiasm,
our research group realized that we had to find another image-sensing
approach. We had an economical computer, super signal processing
hardware and software, but poor imagery."
In an issue of NASA Tech Briefs, an InVision researcher found
an article describing a NASA technology developed for satellite
imaging that utilizes multiple electromagnetic frequencies to
improve image acquisition in all weather conditions. The InVision
group requested and received from NASA a Technical Support Package
(TSP), a collection of detailed technical data about the technology
in question. The TSP, plus advice and consultation provided by
Johnson Space Center, enabled solution of the problem after modification
of the technology to meet InVision's special design requirements.
The TDS-200 system is being produced commercially and it is in
operational service at various U.S. locations.
Another example of Tech Briefs utility is supplied by Eliot
Fenton, president of Integrated Component Systems, Inc. (ICS),
Coconut Creek, Florida, which designs and manufactures synthesizers
and oscillators used in wireless systems, modems, test equipment
and related products. ICS products range in size from inch-square
surface mount units to full size boards for frequency-hopping
communications systems.
A regular reader of Tech Briefs, Fenton read an article therein
that seemed to be the answer to an ICS problem. One of the company's
customers wanted a synthesizer with wide phase modulation characteristics,
yet low noise. The problem was that the two requirements are
inherently incompatible in a single-loop design. An ICS engineer
suggested an approach, but Fenton wanted confirmation.
The Tech Briefs article described research at Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) resulting in a modified configuration for a
phase-locked angle modulator that made it possible to design
the filters in the modulating portion of the circuit independently
of the filter in the phase-locked loop portion; applied to a
phase-locked oscillator, it offered superior phase noise performance.
"The article gave my engineer valuable insight into how
the process works," Fenton said, "and it substantiated
our method as viable for wideband phase modulation." The
technology was incorporated in the ICS series of phase-locked
loop synthesizers.
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