December 15, 2004

CSA Engineering was notified today of Missile Defense Agency (MDA) intent to contract for research in optical mounts, jitter control systems, and high speed valves. CSA’s proposals competed with over 1600 others in the MDA SBIR/STTR program. The research would begin early in 2005 and could lead to over $2M in business for CSA. Three separate contracts are anticipated in areas related to vibration suppression and precision motion control.

In "Lightweight Kinematic Optical Mount for Vibration and Shock Environments," CSA will integrate vibration and shock mitigation into optical mounts without compromising the precision needed for alignment and overall performance. This research will apply technologies developed over two decades, and incorporate recent advances from CSA’s SoftRide product line, to provide stable mounts that are also lightweight, resulting in a new product family for aerospace and industrial markets.

In "Global Jitter Control Design for Integrated Opto-Mechanical Systems," CSA will investigate control techniques to mitigate the propagation of both disturbances and noise in complex optical systems ranging from telescopes to laser weapons. The research will incorporate recent advances made by CSA in the application of adaptive filtering and control, and explore system-level integration and collaboration of multiple interdependent control systems.

Applications in high speed hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) testing will motivate CSA’s research titled "High Bandwidth Servovalve for Motion Simulators." The company will develop valves that operate to frequencies several times greater than current high performance valves, opening the way to their integration in actuators for HWIL motion control systems, and ultimately helping to reduce the need for costly flight testing of missile subsystems.