INTERSTEL TECHNOLOGIES SELECTED FOR NASA STTR PHASE II CONTRACT
Honolulu, HI (March, 2022) – The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has selected Interstel Technologies, Inc. for a Phase II STTR award to continue the development of the iCOSMOS-Swarm™ software and related tools. This project will demonstrate the iCOSMOS-Swarm™ management solution using a hardware testbed consisting of five small satellites (one Mothership and four ChildSats).
iCOSMOS-Swarm™ mission concept with one Mothership and four ChildSats
On December 16, 2021, NASA announced the 20 small business concern (SBC) and non-profit research institution (RI) teams that were selected to negotiate a contract with NASA for Phase II of the Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR). Interstel Technologies was the only SBC chosen from the state of Hawai’i. Interstel™’s RI partner is the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UHM). This award is the successor to the STTR Phase I contract that the Interstel™/UHM team won in 2020 and completed in September 2021. The project’s title for Phase II is “Cooperative Control and Localization of Multiple Spacecraft using a Multi-Agent Mission Operations System.” The Principal Investigator (PI) is Dr. Trevor C. Sorensen (CEO of Interstel Technologies, Inc.), and the RI-PI is Dr. Zhuoyuan Song (Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering). The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is the NASA center overseeing the program and technical aspects of the contract. This proposal was one of only 20 of the 57 Phase I projects selected for Phase II, and was the only Phase II project selected from the state of Hawai'i.
Multi-satellite swarms are becoming popular due to their low costs and short development time. Instead of extensive and costly monolithic satellites, small satellite swarms can be flown as distributed sensing applications for atmospheric sampling, distributed antennas, synthetic apertures, and other exciting applications, delivering an even greater mission capability. This Phase-II project contributes to developing and demonstrating a mission operations system for the robust, coordinated operation of mobile agent swarms in dynamic environments. Through a collaboration with the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Interstel’s Comprehensive Open-architecture Solution for Mission Operations Systems (iCOSMOS™) is being enhanced to coordinate and control swarms of space vehicles and other assets. The iCOSMOS-Swarm™ system enables motion planning for large numbers of agents in densely crowded areas and robust position estimation with built-in cooperative localization. The primary tasks of the Phase II contract include (1) the development of a scalable multi-agent coordination module to coordinate large agent swarms, a multi-nodal software architecture for diverse (heterogeneous) assets, and a hierarchical cooperative localization module for robust inter-agent positioning, (2) enhanced system performance with improved data handling and nodal message passing and dynamic system configuration for node addition and removal, and (3) significantly enhanced simulation capabilities to support up to at least 100 simultaneous nodes, end-to-end simulation of 20 satellite nodes in real-time and faster than realtime, and complete visualization of the mission plans before execution. The resulting product delivery to NASA includes the software source code for iCOSMOS-Swarm™ and the design from a baseline benchmark mission with one Mothership and four ChildSats. The swarm mission will collect dynamic, multi-dimensional data sets over a wildfire outbreak or similar events through the use of multiple detectors spread out in time, space and spectrum.
iCOSMOS-Swarm™ enables scalable mission control for multiple diverse assets for terrestrial or planetary Earth, lunar, or Mars missions with various NASA assets, including aerial, ground, subterranean, and underwater agents. Example missions include, but are not limited to, monitoring large-scale dynamic events (e.g., wildfire outbreak) with convoy agents and following sensing agents or the formation and maintenance of leader-follower satellite constellation for volumetric remote sensing.
iCOSMOS-Swarm™ benefits government agencies in space assets management, fast-growing startup companies in need of low-cost structures to control and support small satellites, academic institutes in supporting space technologies education at low costs, and mission control and management for open-access or shared robotics testbeds, warehouse robots, or other non-space applications.
The contract was signed and executed on March 21, 2022, for a duration 24 months. The value of the contract is approximately $760,000, shared by the SBC and RI.
About Interstel Technologies, Inc.
Interstel™ specializes in multi-spacecraft mission operations software. iCOSMOS-Swarm™ is the main software product developed by Interstel™ in collaboration with its partner research institution, the University of Hawai’i. Interstel™ is a technology spin-off company of the University of Hawai’i. Its prime purpose is to develop commercialized software applications based on the COSMOS software developed and used by the Hawai’i Space Flight Laboratory of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in its satellite missions.
