Flexible Integrated System Health Management for Sustainable Habitats using TEAMS

QSI proposes to field a "Flexible" ISHM Solution for Sustainable Habitats utilizing the TEAMS Toolset and concomitant model-based and data-driven diagnostic/prognostic reasoning technologies to enable the habitat crew to obtain crucial alerts that affect the operation of critical habitat subsystems, as well as provide decision support in the selection of appropriate corrective actions. The solution will utilize habitat's real-time system health assessment, anomaly and failure detection, machine learning and active learning techniques to preserve the operational integrity of the habitat system. The proposed effort will result in a novel capability, where the habitat crew will be given clear and concise decision support to improve situational awareness and perform proactive corrective actions. Automated health assessment, crew alerts and future degradation estimates will be generated to facilitate corrective actions in the face of off-nominal and failure conditions. Additionallly, mechanisms to incorporate undiscovered anomalies into the machine learning algorithms will be pursued. The ISHM solution would reduce the cognitive load on the crew given the abundance of information that has to be reasoned upon in a timely fashion. They will be critical for improving mission and system safety. These technologies would reduce the cost and risk of habitat operations, across all its phases: development, flight unit production, launch, and operations.

NASA's current vision to enhance the level of autonomy in its earth and space missions makes the proposed effort worthy of funding from several branches within it. The proposed technology, aimed at improving the reliability and performance of sustainable habitats through the use of diagnostic and prognostic failure and anomaly detection techniques, active learning and trending capabilities, and the software tool for supporting its implementation will allow NASA to better plan and execute future Science Missions. The technology can be leveraged to facilitate endurance in complex systems, such as NASA's long-duration missions in space science and exploration. It is envisioned that the technology will also be ready to be operated as part of NASA's next generation Mission Control Technology allowing NASA to utilize the continuous health assessment and mission satisfiability information from the tool for improved mission execution while improving safety, mission success probability and the overall operational uptime of the habitat platform. This technology can also be applied to NASA's Earth based green initiatives such as the Sustainable Habitat designed for self-sustainment. The application of this technology in habitat systems will enable the next frontier in exploration by providing greater access to deep space environments and by providing greater operational handling that extends mission capabilities.

The application of habitats in government, industrial, and commercial applications makes them an obvious commercialization target for this technology. We envisage the proposed technology to be of significant interest inside DoD's Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), FAA, US Air Force, US Navy, and commercial space vendors (e.g., Boeing, SpaceX). The development of the various interacting technology components for health-monitoring enabled anomaly/failure and degradation detection can be easily directed towards mission assurance and will be of direct interest to large-scale military systems (systems of systems) such as NORAD, Space Command ground segments, the Navy shipboard platforms and Submarine Commands. In addition, offshore platform industry, greenhouse industry, bio-domes, nuclear shelters, and extreme weather research stations are potential targets as well. Other examples of use of this technology include manufacturing, transportation (air transport, self-driving vehicles, and electric cars), energy (smart grids), space (on-orbit inspection and repair, mining), agriculture, healthcare (prosthetics, rehabilitation, surgery), marine environments, education (inspiring science, technology, engineering and mathematics education), public safety (emergency response, hazardous material handling, bomb disposal), and consumer products (household robots). This solution can also be marketed to commercial habitat operators and maintainers.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 4) — 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.