Incorporation of Flexibility into the Avionics Subsystem for the TALARIS Small Advanced Prototype Vehicle

摘要

The TALARIS (Terrestrial Artificial Lunar And Reduced gravity Simulator) hopper is a small prototype vehicle currently being developed as an Earth-based testbed for guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) algorithms that will be used to explore lunar and other planetary surfaces remotely. As part of the project, the hopper is being developed with flexibility explicitly incorporated into its subsystems. Flexibility is the ability of the subsystem to be changed easily and rapidly in order to accommodate changes in the external context for the subsystem, which may include changes in other interacting subsystems, the availability of new technology, or even stakeholder expectations. The process and initial results of incorporating flexibility into the avionics subsystem of the hopper are described in this paper. Two methods, modularity and the retention of the maximum possible overhead capacity in the design, are applied to enable future changes in the avionics subsystem in a way such that responsiveness to changes in the external context for the system is maximized. Lessons learned from incorporating flexibility into a subsystem on a small advanced vehicle development project are given, as well as some details of the avionics subsystem itself. Future implications of the flexible design are also discussed.