Expedient Formulator for Generative Evaluation (XFORGE)

Expedient Formulator for Generative Evaluation (XFORGE) is a framework that transforms Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) calculations into formulations that have the advantages of speed, numerical accuracy, and computational stability. XFORGE enables significant Size, Weight and Power, Cost, and Performance (SwaP-CP) improvements over current state-of-the-art Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) GNC calculations by generating equivalent formulations that have no numerical errors or instabilities. Within XFORGE, these formulations can be implemented in flight-like hardware and assessed so that implementations that require excessive computer resources, are too sensitive to environmental factors, are susceptible to Cyber-attack etc., are eliminated. Finally, fault tolerance technology is applied across the formulations to provide an expedient, stable, robust implementation of required GNC calculations. XFORGE differs from COTS GNC calculations which use standard primitives (e.g. square root, sine, exponential) to implement trigonometric and algebraic equations. These standard primitives use iterative algorithms that loop through successively better estimates until the required accuracy is obtained (e.g. the “Newton-Raphson Method”). This method is fragile to implementation methodologies such as mixing single precision and double precision variables within the same calculation. Also, the amount of time needed to complete COTS GNC calculations varies depending on the values of the inputs, and sometimes the inputs can completely disrupt flight computer operations. XFORGE has the potential to eliminate these types of GNC software failures by providing spacecraft developers specific implementations of GNC calculations that will prevent similar losses in future flight systems.

NASA Applications Robust computational SW for GNC -Including distance measurement Fault-tolerant algorithms for safety-critical missions Algorithm design for high-bandwidth control-loop contexts -Precise spacecraft docking

Non-NASA applications Algorithm implementations appropriate to cost-reduced hardware platforms -Guided munitions Fault-tolerance in high-bandwidth contexts -Telecommunications -Hardware

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