Software Defined Reliability for Low Cost Digital Signal Processors on Small Spacecraft

Software-based redundancy methods offer a solution to achieve high reliability with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, providing a significantly reduced development cycle as well as lower SWaP and cost. By contrast, conventional hardware-based methods for the use of high performance applications-specific processors in space are very costly and introduce a long delay between terrestrial and spaceflight use. This proposal investigates the use of Astrobotic’s Software Defined Reliability product, A-SDR, for the reliable use of COTS coprocessors in space through a specific study of a Texas Instruments digital signal processor (DSP) IC.A-SDR is a lightweight, low-overhead software consensus framework designed to detect and correct transient single event effects with minimal hardware requirements. With its software-based mitigation techniques, A-SDR can elevate this powerful multicore DSP IC to be flight-reliable, delivering 160 Gigaflops of computing power with a typical power consumption of less than 15 Watts. This capability is simply not available in space today and would have a broad impact on the autonomy of small spacecraft missions, and Astrobotic has identified a specific spaceflight application that requires this advanced computing performance to serve as a proof of concept: autonomous free-flying navigation in LEO and on planetary surfaces. Unlocking these high-performance computing applications will enable a new era of autonomy in spaceflight.