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NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Move to Talk, Talk to Move: Tightly Integrated Communication and Control for Coordinated Swarms of Small Spacecraft

The Move to Talk, Talk to Move: Tightly Integrated Communication and Control for Coordinated Swarms of Small Spacecraft project will build on existing research on collaborative autonomy of multi-agent systems and design techniques that will enable coordinated communication and control of spacecraft. The success of many space exploration and science missions hinges on real-time monitoring of time-varying and/or geographically distributed phenomena. This monitoring can be achieved using a swarm of small spacecraft, which collect data about the environment and share information within the swarm of spacecraft. Current space exploration missions typically issue commands to control each spacecraft individually from Earth, and the data gathered by each spacecraft is also transmitted to Earth separately via X-band communication over the Deep Space Network (DSN). This approach is expensive, slow, and unreliable. Many coordinated tasks amongst a swarm of autonomous agents (or, specifically, small spacecraft) rely on communication. Existing control, estimation, and decision algorithms often assume that mostly reliable communications are available; however, this is often not the case in actual environments and thus is a barrier to operating swarms of small spacecraft.

Qi Han↗

NASA NTRS2020

Ramp Traffic Console (RTC) and Ramp Manager Traffic Console (RMTC) User Manual

This document serves as a user manual for the ATD-2 Ramp Traffic Console (RTC) (version 5.11) utilized by the Ramp Control Tower. It describes the elements of the RTC interface and provides step-by-step instructions for using the tool. RTC provides live flight information, including, flight state and location, departure/arrival schedules, gate conflicts, Traffic Management Initiative (TMI) restrictions, and gate advisories to support Surface Time-Based Metering (STBM). RTC facilitates information sharing with the Air Traffic Control (ATC) Tower. This document also provides instructions for use of the Ramp Manager Traffic Console (RMTC) for Ramp Manager functions, such as managing the priority flight list and setting the ramp status. The RTC/RMTC ramp tools are components of the NASA Airspace Technology Demonstration 2 (ATD-2) sub-project.

Deborah Lee Bakowski↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Supply Chain: Meeting the UAM Demand

15 minute introduction of Supply-Chain Life Cycle – a. Lifecycle, models, scaling up b. Standardization while maintaining IP, increasing efficiency c. Access and Information sharing (NASA/USAF platform) d. Reducing total cycle time and increasing scaling potential

UAM↗

NASA NTRS2020

Introduction to ISS Crew Displays

The International Space Station (ISS) began payload operations in earnest in 2000 with the arrival of the Expedition 1. To date, ISS has offered Principal Investigators (PIs) a reliable platform for microgravity research, having hosted thousands of onboard science experiments. Most of this research is supported by experiment hardware and software and many include a crew‐operated Graphical User Interface (GUI). The purpose of this article is to share information with PIs and Payload Developer (PD) teams about the processes, standards, and guidelines applicable to crew GUI design that must be complied with when planning payload software. The goal is not to enumerate all of the ISS display standards, but rather to highlight design guidelines and the ISS Program milestones for verification and approval of onboard crew displays.

Graphical User Interface↗

NASA NTRS2021

STEReO

STEReO brings together several technologies in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM), Autonomy, Communications, Human Factors, and Domain Expertise & Tools, aimed at providing scalability and flexibility, as well as operational resiliency to dynamic changes during a disaster event. Some of the concepts STEReO explores are: collaborative tools to ingest remote sensing information and distribute a common mission operating picture, apply ad-hoc communication networks to facilitate timely information sharing and communication of changes, vehicle-to-vehicle and onboard autonomy technologies ensure the safety and resiliency of operations, and apply NASA’s UAS traffic management system (UTM) as a public safety UAS Service Supplier (USS) to access and coordinate use of the airspace by both manned and unmanned operations. The potential benefits of STEReO include: standardized, cross-platform communication means increased interoperability and ease of cooperation/collaboration, increased situation awareness and common operating picture allow for earlier detection and decision making, and scalable to size and complexity of environment, operations, and mission objectives. This brochure/posture gives an overview of the STEReO project and identifies STEReO as one of the research efforts under the Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) project within ARMD's Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP).

traffic management↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations (STEReO)

STEReO brings together several technologies in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM), Autonomy, Communications, Human Factors, and Domain Expertise & Tools, aimed at providing scalability and flexibility, as well as operational resiliency to dynamic changes during a disaster event. Some of the concepts STEReO explores are: collaborative tools to ingest remote sensing information and distribute a common mission operating picture, apply ad-hoc communication networks to facilitate timely information sharing and communication of changes, vehicle-to-vehicle and onboard autonomy technologies ensure the safety and resiliency of operations, and apply NASA’s UAS traffic management system (UTM) as a public safety UAS Service Supplier (USS) to access and coordinate use of the airspace by both manned and unmanned operations. The potential benefits of STEReO include: standardized, cross-platform communication means increased interoperability and ease of cooperation/collaboration, increased situation awareness and common operating picture allow for earlier detection and decision making, and scalable to size and complexity of environment, operations, and mission objectives. This flyer gives an overview of the STEReO project, to be used a handout given to atteendees of the ARMD Wildfire Management Workshop.

traffic management↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

STEReO Combining NASA Technologies and Partnerships to Transform Current-day Emergency Response Operations

STEReO brings together several technologies in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM), Autonomy, Communications, Human Factors, and Domain Expertise & Tools, aimed at providing scalability and flexibility, as well as operational resiliency to dynamic changes during a disaster event. Some of the concepts STEReO explores are: collaborative tools to ingest remote sensing information and distribute a common mission operating picture, apply ad-hoc communication networks to facilitate timely information sharing and communication of changes, vehicle-to-vehicle and onboard autonomy technologies ensure the safety and resiliency of operations, and apply NASA’s UAS traffic management system (UTM) as a public safety UAS Service Supplier (USS) to access and coordinate use of the airspace by both manned and unmanned operations. The potential benefits of STEReO include: standardized, cross-platform communication means increased interoperability and ease of cooperation/collaboration, increased situation awareness and common operating picture allow for earlier detection and decision making, and scalable to size and complexity of environment, operations, and mission objectives. This presentation serves as a status update to the activities within the STEReO project, detailing progress made in the past year, to attendees of the Tactical Fire Remote Sensing Advisory Committee (TFRSAC) spring workshop. Presentation includes two videos which are included as downloadable files, video play time for NASTA_adsb_+_UAS_v2.mp4 1 min 55 secs, for NASTA_eng315_v2.mp4 1 min 34 secs.

emergency response operations↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Initial Design Guidelines for Onboard Automation of Flight Path Management

Achieving the National Academy of Science’s vision of advanced aerial mobility will depend on significant developments in automation to achieve safe and efficient operations. Flight path management (FPM), a major category of automation functionality needed to achieve this vision, will provide dynamic management of an aircraft’s flight path, ensuring that it remains feasible to fly to mission completion, deconflicted from hazards, coordinated with other traffic, flexible to accommodate future disturbances, and optimized to meet business objectives. While efforts are underway to advance FPM technology for the Urban Air Mobility application, initial design guidelines are presented for FPM automation capabilities to achieve each of these objectives based on 15+ years of prior FPM automation research and development. Methods to efficiently account for uncertainty in the prediction of trajectories are described, as are additional considerations for prioritizing safety in the design of FPM automation capabilities and interactions between aircraft. Recommendations are supported by extensive experience gained via previous work with the FPM reference automation system, Autonomous Operations Planner, developed by NASA. By employing capable FPM automation supported by cooperative operational flight rules and information sharing, future aircraft operators will benefit from an increased ability to plan and execute safe and efficient flights and to achieve mission success in a dynamic airspace.

Flight Path Management, FPM, AOP, UAM, deconflicti↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Initial Design Guidelines for Onboard Automation of Flight Path Management

Flight Path Management↗

NASA NTRS2021

STEReO AIAA 2021

STEReO brings together several technologies in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM), Autonomy, Communications, Human Factors, and Domain Expertise & Tools, aimed at providing scalability and flexibility, as well as operational resiliency to dynamic changes during a disaster event. Some of the concepts STEReO explores are: collaborative tools to ingest remote sensing information and distribute a common mission data set, apply ad-hoc communication networks to facilitate timely information sharing and communication of changes, vehicle-to-vehicle and onboard autonomy technologies ensure the safety and resiliency of operations, and apply NASA’s UAS traffic management system (UTM) as a public safety UAS Service Supplier (USS) to access and coordinate use of the airspace by both manned and unmanned operations. The potential benefits of STEReO include: standardized, cross-platform communication means increased interoperability and ease of cooperation/collaboration, increased situation awareness to assist in earlier detection and decision making, and scalable to size and complexity of environment, operations, and mission objectives. This presentation gives a high-level overview of the STEReO concept, what we have done so far, and a preview of what's to come.

UAS vehicles↗

NASA NTRS2022

Applicability of Digital Flight to the Operations of Self-Piloted Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the National Airspace System

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) hold great promise for a new era of specialized missions, including personal air transportation, cargo flight operations, aerial surveys, inspections, firefighting and more. The anticipated market growth is significant. To unlock its scalability and incumbent benefits requires a human to oversee multiple flights simultaneously, focusing on multi-vehicle mission management and relinquishing to autonomous systems their active role in controlling the aircrafts’ flight paths. Key to the realization of these scalability benefits is minimally-encumbered access to the National Airspace System (NAS), which poses some unique challenges for self-piloted UAS aircraft operations. These include the requirement for compatibility with existing airspace structures and operations including Visual Flight Rules (VFR) and Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), neither of which were developed to accommodate the unique needs and capabilities of UAS. This paper explores the applicability of Digital Flight to the operations of self-piloted UAS. As proposed by NASA, Digital Flight is a flight operations capability, enabled by a set of cooperative procedures and digital technologies, in which flight operators ensure flight-path safety through automated separation and flight path management in lieu of visual procedures and Air Traffic Control separation services. Flights operating under potentially-forthcoming rules of Digital Flight employ advanced automation technologies, information sharing, connectivity to operational data, and cooperative behaviors through distributed decision-making to maintain safety and achieve mission objectives. Designed for integration with VFR and IFR operations in shared NAS airspace, potentially as a third set of flight rules, Digital Flight may provide the mechanism for UAS operators – and all aircraft operators – to scale and diversify their operations beyond what is achievable under current regulations.

DFR↗

NASA NTRS2022

Diagnosing Challenges and Setting Priorities for Sustainable Water Resource Management Under Climate Change

Managing transboundary river basins requires balancing tradeoffs of sustainable water use and coping with climate uncertainty. We demonstrate an integrated approach to exploring these issues through the lens of a social-ecological system, combining remote and in-situ earth observations, hydrologic and climate models, and social surveys. Specifically, we examine how climate change and dam development could impact the Se Kong, Se San and Sre Pok rivers in the Mekong region. We find that climate change will lead to increased precipitation, necessitating a shift in dam operations, from maintaining low flows to reducing flood hazards. We also find that existing water governance systems in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia are ill-prepared to address the problem. We conclude that the solution space for addressing these complex issues will be highly constrained unless major deficiencies in transboundary water governance, strategic planning, financial capacity, information sharing, and law enforcement are remedied in the next decades.

Ibrahim Nourein Mohammed↗

NASA NTRS2020

A Visual Analytics Approach to Debugging Cooperative, Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems’ Worldviews

Autonomous multi-robot systems, where a team of robots shares information to perform tasks that are beyond an individual robot’s abilities, hold great promise for a number of applications, such as planetary exploration missions. Each robot in a multi- robot system autonomously schedules which robots should perform a given task and when, using its worldview–the robot’s internal representation of its belief about the environment and other robots’ states. A key problem for operators is that robots’ worldviews can fall out of sync (often due to weak communication links), leading to desynchronization of the robots’ scheduling decisions and inconsistent emergent behavior (e.g., tasks not performed, or performed by multiple robots). Operators face the time-consuming and difficult task of making sense of the robots’ scheduling decisions, detecting de-synchronizations, and pinpointing their cause by comparing every robot’s worldview. To address these challenges, we introduce MOSAIC Viewer, a visual analytics system that helps operators (i) make sense of the robots’ schedules and (ii) detect and conduct a root cause analysis of the robots’ desynchronized worldviews. Over a year-long partnership with roboticists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a formative study was performed to identify the necessary system design requirements, which supports the design of the system. A qualitative study with 12 roboticists reveals that MOSAIC Viewer is faster- and easier-to-use than the users’ current approaches, and it allows them to stitch low-level details to formulate a high-level understanding of the robots’ schedules and detect and pin-point the cause of desynchronized worldviews.

Ma, Kwan-Liu↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Overview of JAXA and NASA Collaboration on Manned and Unmanned Aircraft Operations Integration in Disaster Response

Natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity. With that increase has come an increased focus on improving disaster response efforts. As part of this focus, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have been in collaboration since 2016 to explore improved airspace management for disaster response through the integration of manned aircraft and small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The approach to this integration has been through leveraging JAXA’s Disaster Relief Aircraft Information Sharing Network (D-NET) system for the coordinated management of manned aircraft assets combined with NASA’S UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system for the management of UAS assets. To drive the innovation in improved response, JAXA and NASA have successfully connected respective systems and conducted a series of live flight tests first as part of a large-scale disaster drill and later in dedicated research flights. In each case, the D-NET and UTM systems were connected and exchanged data in real-time, which supported the planning and tracking of manned and unmanned operations. Through these test events, a number of key findings were derived through data analysis and stakeholder interviews with respect to the improvements offered by the integrated systems as well as key considerations for situation awareness of pilots regarding other operations in the airspace and flight path management.

disaster response↗

NASA NTRS2021

Dare Mighty Things

Winston Churchill once said, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” JPL’s Property Accountability objective is to provide superior services related to property accountability, reutilization, and disposition. JPL must report property reutilized and disposed through either sales, donation, or scrap. Implementing the JPL designed and built Property Information Reporting System (PIRS), opened a new perspective with our data and what are we reporting to NASA. With this new depth of visibility, we self-implemented as assessment to validate the fiduciary and stewardship responsibilities of what is being reporting to NASA. JPL strives to perform at a level beyond the basic primary expectations of our NASA requirements. JPL developed the PIRS - which rolled out in 2018 - to simplify the delivery of JPL’s Personal Property and Equipment (PP&E) reporting: PIRS takes the raw data from Oracle to generate the NASA Form (NF) 1018 and Contractor Held Asset Reporting System (CHATS) Reports, and to meet the requirements established for AS9100 compliance. The data presented from PIRS is exportable and used to analyze our property records. JPL is also embarking on an effort to define the JPL of the future with “Enterprise 2.0”. Enterprise 2.0 is the driving force of JPL’s strategy to digitally transform the Laboratory from the current legacy processes and systems to a modern, integrated, information-driven highway of business transactions. This should include automation of routine processes and data-related tasks, integration of data and systems, advanced search and analytics, and improved information sharing and collaboration. As JPL’s evolving landscape of digital technologies advance to meet the future, JPL Property Accountability is making strides to surpass these expectations. For every cause there is an effect: a revealing of something that aids in the further development and transformation of JPL best business practices.

Sucher, Jay M↗

NASA NTRS2022

Cooperative Separation in Upper Class E Airspace

This document presents baseline functional requirements for a prototype NASA research Upper Class E Traffic Management (ETM) system to enable the cooperative separation concept [1, 2]. The baseline functional requirements are developed by incorporating inputs from NASA and the FAA researchers and engineering staff, and industry partners while accounting for the unique performance characteristics and mission needs of various existing and future ETM vehicle types. The functionalities include information sharing for situational awareness, conformance monitoring, and operating practices for cooperative separation. Several realistic traffic scenarios were built to test, validate, and demonstrate the cooperatively managed operation in the ETM environment and the associated capabilities in a simulation environment.

Upper Class E Air Traffic Management↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Breaking Down Data Silos

Siloed schedule data creates barriers to information sharing and collaboration. In short, siloed data is not healthy data. If schedule data isn't easy to find and use in a timely fashion (or can't be trusted when it is found) it isn’t adding value. Many programs, projects, and initiatives are accustomed to working in their own worlds with their own lingo, processes, and challenges. This culture of separation carries over to schedules. This presentation will showcase SCaN’s efforts to break down the silo mentality.

schedule↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Development and Implementation of a Small Satellite Systems Engineering Webinar Series: A Collaboration Between United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) established a webinar series on NASA systems engineering standards and practices for the purpose of sharing knowledge in this area through UNOOSA’s “Access to Space for All” which provides free and accessible educational content. Through NASA’s Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute (S3VI), the four-part series was designed to cover basic systems engineering and project management skills that are fundamental for planning, developing, and implementing an experiment or a space project, and that serve as critical knowledge for those engaged in space activities, whether as a designer, builder, or manager of space infrastructure and services. This first series of webinars was convened over the course of November 2023 through February 2024. The webinar series was segmented into four one and a half hour webinars which covered topics related to the Fundamentals of Systems Engineering, Requirements and Systems Engineering, System Assembly, Integration and Test, and Spacecraft Handling, as well as an Introduction to the Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute (S3VI). The agendas for the first three webinars focused on addressing a number of questions relevant to a particular topic. Examples of these questions include: What is systems engineering and what does a systems engineer do? Why does NASA use systems engineering? How do you define requirements for a small spacecraft mission? Why are requirements important to space missions? How are trade studies used to determine parts selection and why are they important? The final webinar of the first series provided interactive discussions and demonstrations of the S3VI tools; shared information on additional webinar opportunities offered by the S3VI; and reviewed databases curated by the S3VI that include the Small Satellite Reliability Initiative (SSRI) Knowledge Base Tool, Mission Design Tools, Small Spacecraft Information Search, and the State-of-the-Art (SoA) Small Spacecraft Report. Future webinar series will be conducted with topics are to be determined. The presenter will discuss details related to the first webinar series and future plans for additional series.

systems engineering↗