Notice of Intent to Award Sole Source

NASA AMES has a need for a wind-generating system for an indoor laboratory designed to study aerial robotics.  The system should be composed of numerous, individually controllable (via a laptop-class computer) small (but powerful) fans, with the fans mounted in a rectangular modular array that can be repositioned (rolled) within the confines of an existing 40 foot by 70-foot indoor robotics laboratory test area at Ames (building M45).  This indoor test area is currently outfitted with an OptiTrack motion-capture system (a set of high-performance cameras) that allows for the attitude and motion of flying robots to be recorded.  In order to study the effects of time-, speed-, and spatially-varying winds on flying robots, we require the array of fans to be approximately 9 feet wide by 6 feet tall and capable of providing accurate and finely-detailed control over individual regions of the array (the mental notion of a ‘fan/wind pixel’ may be helpful here).   We estimate that to provide the required ‘wind resolution’ for an array of this size, each ‘fan/wind pixel’ should be approximately 2” to 5” in diameter, with the system consisting in total of approximately 500-600 individual high-powered fans.  To provide the best flow quality (free of excessive swirl from individual fans), the fans should counter-rotate.  All electronics and wiring should be integrated within the fan array housings and supports, and the power supply and connections should be compatible with industry standards for laboratory equipment.  Each fan must have the capability to communicate with the control computer via software, and that software should be easily configurable by the user (via a modern programming language) to create a variety of user-defined flow patterns that can vary in wind duration, pattern, and/or wind strength.