The Common Front End: Integrated Avionics, Diagnostics, and Standardised Measurement Interface for Hypersonic Flight Experiments

The Common Front End is a high-speed flight testbed concept under development in a collaborative effort between Lockheed Martin Australia and The University of New South Wales, Canberra. The testbed is a modular, scalable, and payload agnostic solution to enable the maturation and in-flight demonstration of technologies through their inclusion as flight experiments. Each flight vehicle will include a standardised suite of diagnostics - pressure sensors, thermocouples, and an inertial measurement unit, to capture the real-time flight environment and provide experimenters with essential contextual data of the flight conditions and vehicle state. A Raspberry Pi 5 will serve as the central flight computer, supported by a robust communication architecture based on Cyclone DDS and schema-less CBOR messaging. This paper will outline the CFE’s modular avionics and experiment interface. Emphasis is placed on its sensor suite and data handling approach to inform future users and collaborators of the testbed’s modularity, capabilities and interface requirements.