Sleuth & Guide - Auto Checkout and Tasking for PnP

The problem of long and costly development cycles for satellite command and control flight software is not unique to the AFRL's TacSat Programs. In order to shorten the time-to-flight for spacecraft software systems, Interface and Control Systems has devised a software ontology which will greatly reduce the development and validation time required to field new flight software systems on Spacecraft. Our Phase 1 SLEUTH and GUIDE products will automate the discovery of device and service capabilities and adapt the onboard system based on the information provided by SPA compatible, plug and play avionics hardware and software. The proposed architecture will replace labor intensive, hand-generated logic with auto-generated embedded systems code in an extremely cost-effective manner. The round trip time to sense PnP device capabilities, generate code, load the code to the target processor, and validate functionality will be reduced to minutes. Auto-coding tools will allow rapid reconfiguration of algorithms and flight profiles. ICS will demonstrate a highly automated test and checkout capability with the Sleuth architecture and provide an advanced planning and tasking capability (Guide) which shares a common infrastructure for definition of relationships between onboard sensors and subsystems.