The satellite stem cell architecture

Erlank, A. O.; Bridges, C. P.

doi:10.1109/ssci.2016.7850165

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The GPIO lines have been demonstrated successfully interfacing to I2C buses, driving DC motors, and reading analogue inputs [4]. However, the current design of GPIO circuitry has certain limitations.…”

Section: Implementation Results and Overheadsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Graceful degeneracy is most effective if it is a core system design goal. Thus the Artificial Stem Cell (ASC) architecture was proposed with this goal in mind [3,4].…”

Section: Bio-inspired Reliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To this end, an alternative system architecture, inspired by multicellular organisms, has been proposed [3,4]. The Artificial Stem Cell Architecture focuses on achieving graceful degeneracy by building complex systems out of initially identical, reconfigurable 'cells', instead of unique, discrete subsystems.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Satellite stem cells: The benefits & overheads of reliable, multicellular architectures

Erlank

Bridges

2017

2017 IEEE Aerospace Conference

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While small, low-cost satellites continue to increase in capability and popularity, their reliability remains a problem. Traditional techniques for increasing system reliability are well known to satellite developers, however, their implementation on low-cost satellites is often limited due to intrinsic mass, volume and budgetary restrictions. Aiming for graceful degeneration, therefore, may be a more promising route. To this end, a stem-cell-inspired, multicellular architecture is being developed using commercial-off-the-shelf components. It aims to replace a significant portion of a typical satellite's bus avionics with a set of initially identical cells. Analogous to biological cells, the artificial cells are able to differentiate during runtime to take on a variety of tasks thanks to a set of artificial proteins. Each cell reconfigures its own proteins within the context of a system-wide distributed task management strategy. In this way, essential tasks can be maintained, even as system cells fail. This paper focusses on two hardware implementations of the stem-cell inspired architecture. The first implementation, based on a single cell, serves as the Payload Interface Computer on a CubeSat named SME-SAT. The second hardware implementation is a benchtop system composed of several cells intended to demonstrate a complete multicellular system in operation. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of these multicellular architectures, the physical attributes of the hardware implementations are compared to those of more traditional implementations and are shown to have enhanced reliability at the cost of increased power and internal bus bandwidth.

show abstract

Section: Implementation Results and Overheadsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Graceful degeneracy is most effective if it is a core system design goal. Thus the Artificial Stem Cell (ASC) architecture was proposed with this goal in mind [3,4].…”

Section: Bio-inspired Reliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Satellite stem cells: The benefits & overheads of reliable, multicellular architectures

Erlank

Bridges

2017

2017 IEEE Aerospace Conference

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The Satellite Stem Cell Architecture was developed as a proposed solution to the problem of low reliability seen to date amongst small, low cost satellites [1,2]. It proposes that satellites can be made out of a set of initially identical, reconfigurable hardware blocks, instead of unique, discrete subsystems.…”

Section: The Satellite Stem Cell Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Modified from [2] Instead, it executes agents as native code on discrete processors. As described in Sect.…”

Section: Agent Execution Environment (Aee)mentioning

confidence: 99%

A hybrid real-time agent platform for fault-tolerant, embedded applications

Erlank

Bridges

2017

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper describes an agent platform based on the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Systems Abstract Architecture, which, together with a highly fault tolerant, bioinspired hardware architecture, aims to increase the reliability of future, low-cost satellites. To achieve the stringent operational requirements imposed by the real-time and resourceconstrained environment of a satellite, the Hybrid Agent Real-Time Platform (HARP) distinguishes itself from other platforms in three areas. Firstly, the HARP middleware uses discrete processors, instead of virtual machines or interpreters, as its agent execution environment. This has the advantage of reducing the agency memory footprint and enabling agents to perform real-time tasks. Secondly, the HARP communication stack makes use of ISO-TP over CAN 2.0A as its transfer level protocol, cutting out resource-intensive layers such as HTTP and IIOP. In addition, the communication stack allows real-time CAN traffic to share the network and be given priority over Agent Communication Language messages. Finally, the HARP middleware embeds a peer-to-peer task manager in each agency, allowing systems which are built using the bio-inspired Artificial Stem Cell Architecture and HARP middleware to autonomously reconfigure in the event of failures. The detailed design of the HARP middleware is given, together with details of an implementation of the HARP middleware on a set of prototype satellite hardware. The performance and scaling potential of the middleware, determined through a set of physical experiments, provide evidence of the practical feasibility of the proposed architecture.

show abstract