National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Small Business Innovation Research & Technology Transfer 2004 Program Solicitations
TOPIC X5 Surface Exploration and Expeditions
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X5.01 Mobile Surface Systems
X5.02 Virtual Exploration
The goals of this topic include working collaboratively with technology developments in the Space Science Enterprise (and other organizations) to enable future human exploration missions to effectively address – and at a fundamental level – the "grand" science challenges facing NASA, driving down the cost of human exploration missions and campaigns beyond Earth orbit, and sharing the experience of exploration with the public. In pursuing these goals, the objectives under this topic include:
1. Developing and validating the capability for human explorers to gain deep lunar and planetary subsurface knowledge and access – both remotely and through sampling – ranging down to 1000s of meters;
2. Enabling cost effective access of human explorers to lunar, planetary, and other deep space locations;
3. Providing hardware and systems required to support manned surface operations;
4. Enabling safe and affordable human exploration of other planetary surfaces – locally but over global distances involving traverses of up to 1000s of kilometers;
5. Integrating and validating the technologies needed to revolutionize public engagement in "virtual exploration" – ranging from higher rate communications, to the creation of virtual reality simulations, to innovative human-machine interfaces; and
6. Establishing a foundation for profitable commercial development of space applications of these technologies in the mid- to long-term.
X5.01 Mobile Surface Systems
Lead Center: JPL
Participating Center(s): ARC, JSC
This subtopic seeks innovative technologies that enable safe, efficient, and highly capable human-robot teams, whether these teams work jointly in the same environment or include remote and local partners. Such teams will prepare lunar or planetary bases for human arrival, support and maintain these human bases, and/or explore lunar or planetary surfaces.
Crew Mobility Systems
One specific research area of interest is mobility systems for crew and/or cargo. This could include local unpressurized transports, long-distance pressurized transports, mobile "habitats," mobile ISRU "plants," or other concepts. Proposals addressing this area should focus on space-relevant hardware, mobility options, logistical issues such as ingress/egress and loading/unloading, and/or functional requirements. Crew transports must also take into account handling rough terrain while carrying suited crew members.
Another area of interest is robotic field assistants that provide various levels of assistance to humans during EVAs, including possibly mobility or transport. Proposals addressing this area should focus on types and levels of assistance and/or space-relevant hardware and interfaces. For instance, robotic field assistants will need space-relevant means to accurately localize themselves with respect to moving crew members, the habitat, and other objects or areas of interest.
Proposals may also address communication between team members, whether between humans and robots, or between multiple robots. The specific focus of such proposals should be interface needs, interface methods, interface reliability, and/or ensuring appropriate communication is sent to all team members.
Proposals may focus on flexibility in switching between modes: autonomous, remote tele-operation, local astronaut-control, and joint control modes; local versus long-distance traverse modes; or behavioral modes. Any given mobile surface system may have multiple modes and multiple tasks. The system itself may need to know when to switch between modes or tasks, and be able to do so cleanly. Human-controlled mode switches also need to be handled smoothly.
A final area of interest is supervised and/or autonomous robotic outpost elements such as communication relays, ISRU devices, or data collectors. Such outposts could involve remote wireless data transfers or periodic transfers of data and/or collected resources to other mobile robotic or human agents. Integration with a robotic field assistant is one useful option. Autonomously or semi-autonomously deploying and maintaining such outposts needs to be addressed, including providing for power and communication needs.
Precursor Mobility Systems
Mobile Surface Systems addresses mid-term development of mobility platforms for precursor missions and robotic systems supporting human-robot mission operations. Work includes the formulation of system concepts, development of enabling technologies, integration of these technologies within an appropriate software and hardware framework, and testing, verification and validation of such system prototypes in representative laboratory and field environments. The applicable technologies and design concepts span the full range of autonomous and telerobotic mobility platforms including high dexterity robotic field assistants, robotic scouts, and robotic systems (in-space and planetary/lunar) for structural inspection and structural repair.
In this year, this subtopic requests proposals specific to the following areas:
- Modular robotic systems (mechanical and electrical);
- Assembly and control of modular systems; and
- Alternative mobility systems (vs. wheels) such as inflatable systems or walking systems.
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X5.02 Virtual Exploration
Lead Center: ARC
Participating Center(s): JSC
Future NASA Exploration Systems will require humans to effectively interface very large sets of both software and physical data. This demands significant advances in human–machine interfaces that will incorporate 2- and 3-D multimodal displays, which will be supported on the back end by high-end computing and sophisticated data management, data fusion, and data mining algorithms. Such interfaces are required for accessing physical spaces, as in teleoperation for robotic exploration, for accessing data repositories, as in ultralarge immersive data sets, and for accessing data that augments human models, as in immersive model exploration and sensory augmentation. The purpose of this call is to catalyze the creation of specific software products and interface design case studies that will enable NASA individuals to explore physical- and software-based data sets as outlined above.
Innovative proposals are sought in the following areas:
- Technologies supporting telerobotics, particularly in the presence of multisecond communications delays, including:
- Predictive interfaces
- Force feedback systems
- Multisensorial displays
- Interfaces for analysis of large heterogeneous databases, including:
- Interactive 2- and 3-D environments, including but not limited to, real-time exploration of these models
- Multimodal displays
- Multisensor data fusion for purposes of both data analysis and situational awareness (e.g., for mission operations and/or telerobotics)
- Data management and data archiving for large data sets (tera to peta bytes)
- Data mining, data compression, and data processing for analysis of large data sets
- Human sensory augmentation for real-time exploration
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