Development of an Event-Driven Low-Power Wireless System for Structural Health Monitoring of Advanced Air Mobility

Abstract

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) vehicles may experience impacts from bird strikes and foreign object debris, motivating in-flight structural health monitoring (SHM). Periodically sampled wireless sensor networks impose a trade-off between polling delay and repeated wake-up energy. We developed an event-driven wireless SHM system in which physical sensor-line severance triggers a hardware interrupt. Flash power gating, MCU Stop 2 mode, autonomous SX1262 RX duty cycling, and compact 16-byte event records reduce power consumption and active transmission time. The hardware includes a TVS diode for electrostatic-discharge (ESD) protection and a shielded enclosure for electromagnetic-interference (EMI) mitigation. Impact tests measured a wake-up/ISR latency of 58.80 μs from sensor disconnection to ISR entry. Across three preliminary drone-hovering runs, 289 of 300 LoRa PHY frames passed CRC, yielding a 96.3% delivery rate and 2890 valid event records from 3000 transmitted records. The estimated net standby current was 516 μA, corresponding to a model-based battery life of 13.2 months under once-daily transmission. These results support physical sensor-line severance as a low-power trigger for rare-event notification in AAM monitoring.