Lunar Telerobotics Design Simulation  

DigitalSpace Corporation (DSC) 

Santa Cruz, CA 
 

Development of an industrial strength vehicle and mission simulation platform supporting collaborative real-time 3D rendering of vehicles, lunar and planetary surface physics and related power/thermal and other trades studies

• Under this SBIR, DigitalSpace has developed a unique open source software platform called Digital Spaces (DSS) that permits real-time 3D design simulation of vehicles and entire mission scenarios
• DSS is now being employed to assist NASA in the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program (RLEP2) in the design iteration of the surface mobility system (rover) for a planned 2011 mission to search for water ice at the Lunar south pole
• The various RLEP2 options are simulated with real terrain physics and vehicle dynamics traversing modeled lunar terrains
• DSS is ideally suited to support the RLEP2 program and the entire ESAS architecture including CLV, HLV, CEV and has been used in the past to model ISS operations and procedures, and Mars surface exploration (MER)

• The DSS platform developed under the SBIR contract is now being applied to design simulation in several industries. Notable applications:
• The Colorado School of Mines, supported by Caterpillar Inc. and other mining and construction industry partners, is seeking real-time physics-based 3D vehicle and mining operations simulations to optimize mining performance and safety
• Raytheon has employed DSS to present lunar mission trade study visualizations for NASA

• The Digital Spaces (DSS) platform is being employed to support NASA's Robotic Lunar Exploration Program (RLEP2) in its pre-phase A and subsequent surface mobility trades. Supported centers: Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville AL (project office) and Ames Research Center (program office)
• Several universities are employing DSS in research on various areas of real-time 3D: gaming and artificial intelligence (University of Southern California), scriptable visualization and analytics (University of Washington) and mining operations simulations (Colorado School of Mines)

Return to NASA SBIR Success Listings