DISTRIBUTED IN-FLIGHT SENSOR CONTROL (DISCO) CFS COMPONENT

Coordinated swarms of robots can carry out sensing missions that are too complex or dangerous for single robots or humans. Many of these new mission concepts can be performed more efficiently by a new class of minimally capable robots called sensorcraft. Emergent Space Technologies, Inc. is developing an innovative software application called Distributed In-flight Sensor Control (DISCo), that enables the management of sensors in a swarm. DISCo efficiently processes sensor data and adapts to the introduction of new sensors and new sensor processing abilities in swarms of mobile robots. It also provides a cooperative architecture, allowing robots with limited computational capabilities and limited communications range to leverage remote resources on other robots in the swarm. DISCo enables sensorcraft to efficiently provide supporting sensing capabilities for a broad spectrum of uses and to seamlessly integrate hosted payloads onto host platforms.

This Phase IIe SBIR effort is a follow-on to a Phase I and Phase I Option SBIR originally submitted in response to the DARPA SBIR solicitation entitled “Fractionated Picosats.” The primary objective of this work is to develop the DISCo framework, which enables a swarm of mobile robots to remotely operate sensors available on less-expensive but low-capability vehicles (sensorcraft) or hosted payloads in the swarm.

Our current Phase II extension effort aims to culminate in a functional flight test of the DISCo software running on autonomous vehicles to demonstrate mission-like operations. After that test, the software would be ready for adaptation to meet the needs of various missions and hardware after the completion of Phase IIe.

This contract is issued by the U.S. Army Contracting Command – Redstone, under Contract Number W31P4Q-14-C-0081, and is funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).