Wireless Avionics and Human Interfaces for Inflatable Spacecraft

Abstract

Revolutionary capabilities for robust control of inflatable Lunar and Martian transit vehicles and planetary habitats can be developed using advanced wireless network technology and modular avionics coupled with facile human to system interfaces. Fully wireless modular avionics would eliminate any cabling associated with power and data transmission, allowing easy deployment of flexible control systems and human interfaces. Furthermore, wearable human interface systems hosting virtual reality interaction methods can provide significant improvement in human situational awareness and control of dynamic space systems. The crew can interact with intelligent software agents providing human-like interaction using speech. These advanced information management systems would incorporate intelligent software agents to assist the crew in performing vehicle and mission operations.Advances in robust wireless data communications and wireless power transmission are the key technologies that enable this new spacecraft architecture. This paper will cover the proposed architecture for wireless spacecraft avionics including innovative human interaction techniques with spacecraft systems. The team believes these two aspects are intimately related and that mobile virtual human interfaces can solve many problems associated with operating spacecraft based on inflatable structures. Conventional architectures allocate much space to a cockpit from which the spacecraft is piloted and monitored. For the transit to Mars, which in most scenarios takes approximately 6 months, the cockpit becomes a major consumer of available space while being used only briefly during the journey for earth departure and planetary approach. Wireless control of the spacecraft would allow the piloting and monitoring function to be carried out from any location within the crew space. Identifying key technology developments required to support this architecture will involve evaluating current and next generation wireless networks, computational modules and wireless power transmission for avionics. Complementary methods for virtual human interfaces will be evaluated, with the rapid development of this technology enabling significant advances to be realized in the next decade. 1 2 For piloting and monitoring functions it will be necessary to have virtual reality for looking outside the transit ship. Because of the radiation shielding required beyond the atmosphere and magnetosphere, there will be no clear view to the outside of the spacecraft. The visual capability will 1 have to be provided by remote presence technology, which ties the virtual reality visual system with cameras on the outside of the craft. Spoken commanding and interaction with ship systems is also an important part of this concept. As ship systems become more complex, it will become impossible for the crew to remember exact details of all aspects of the operating environment. In this case the ability to ask questions about spacecraft status and have the agents issue audible spoken advisories and warn...

Fault tolerance in ZigBee wireless sensor networks

“…Finally, wireless data paths could result in unusual architectures for future avionics systems, with as yet unidentified properties and advantages. 1 On the other hand, wireless signaling is always subject to interference from other RF sources. A wireless node that is transmitting generally cannot simultaneously receive signals resulting in half-duplex operation of all nodes -a distinct limitation.…”

Formal Framework for Safety, Security, and Availability of Aircraft Communication Networks

“…While these approaches have lead to more reliable systems, they do not account for the challenges of network migration. Wireless avionics, and human interfaces for spacecraft [5] are pushing towards migration of wired networks to wireless. In the absence of fault-tolerance mechanisms, experimental performance evaluation has been employed to assess network reliability [6,7] to understand the likelihood of failure when it cannot be prevented.…”