In the future, machines will monitor their own health and request help, themselves, when something’s wrong, predicts David Cirulli, engineering vice president and cofounder of CEMSol LLC.
“There’s going to be an integrated system-health engine as part of every system out there, and it will be able to interface with other systems and components,” says Cirulli. “That’s what’s missing today.” He compares the capability to how sick human patients can verbalize symptoms to a doctor, giving them the crucial information they need to diagnose a problem.
The first version of what would become CEMSol’s Integrated System Health Management software was developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in 2003 as a way to monitor an experimental hybrid rocket engine test bed that used both gas and solid fuel.
Traditionally, this would have been accomplished by building models and running simulations, but an engineer at Ames instead developed the Inductive Monitoring System (IMS) to gather and interpret real data automatically.