Automation of Health Management, Troubleshooting and Recovery in Lunar Outpost

NASA's Lunar and other future extraterrestrial outposts will be built for long duration missions that are likely to experience significant number of faults and degradations over its lifetime. Additionally, these systems will have a highly reconfigurable architecture and perform multimodal operation. Being a resource constrained environment, health management, troubleshooting, maintenance, and repair of the Lunar outpost poses formidable challenge. To address this challenge Qualtech Systems, Inc. proposes to automate a major part of the HM and recovery decision support systems through a TEAMS-based approach. The approach will provide the facility to develop on-the-fly reconfigurable diagnostic models that can be used to automatically update a TEAMS model upon configuration changes. Residual functional capability estimation techniques and automatic updating of diagnostic models based on current condition of components will be developed through this effort. Dynamic multiple fault diagnosis techniques will be used for enhancing the diagnostic accuracy obtained from TEAMS-based diagnosis. Such accuracy enhancement will greatly reduce the amount of human intervention required in troubleshooting of spurious faults, and faults that are isolated with a large ambiguity group. On the overall, the proposed effort will provide a solution for automating the HM related activities in highly reconfigurable systems with resource constraints.

Continuously monitored hard to replace systems are major Non-NASA candidates for using the resultant solution from this effort. The solution will be useful in condition assessment and maintenance decision support for reconfigurable systems in Aircraft, Automobiles and Ships. Industrial systems that use equipment in multiple configuration, such as those in Semiconductor, or Machine Building plants will constitute another segment of non-NASA candidates for using the resultant technology.

The resultant solution from this effort will be valuable in automating the health management, maintenance, and repair of all NASA systems that can operate in multiple configurations and/or are designed for long term missions. Space stations, Lunar Outpost, Mars Outpost, and spacecraft planned for faraway planetary expeditions are potential candidates for using this solution. Additionally, ground support systems that interact with each other and operate in multiple configurations can benefit from the solution as well.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.