NASA STTR 2005 Solicitation

FORM B - PROPOSAL SUMMARY


PROPOSAL NUMBER:05 T1.01-9797
RESEARCH SUBTOPIC TITLE:Information Technologies for System Health Management, Autonomy, and Scientific Exploration
PROPOSAL TITLE:Mitigating Software Failures with Distributed and Recovery-Oriented Flight System Architectures

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (SBC): RESEARCH INSTITUTION (RI):
NAME: Kestrel Technology LLC NAME:Jet Propulsion Laboratory
ADDRESS:3260 Hillview Ave. ADDRESS:4800 Oak Grove Dr., MS 301-270
CITY:Palo Alto CITY:Pasadena
STATE/ZIP:CA  94304-1201 STATE/ZIP:CA  91109-8001
PHONE: (650) 320-8888 PHONE: (818) 393-6234

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name,Email)
Allen   Goldberg
goldberg@kestreltechnology.com

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
The primary focus of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) has been on faults due to hardware failures. Yet software is growing in complexity, controls critical functionality under a wide range of conditions and does so with greater autonomy. Furthermore, software errors have negatively impacted major missions.

Runtime recovery from software faults is gaining momentum in research community with major efforts such as the IBM autonomic computing effort and the Stanford/Berkeley Recovery-Oriented Computing project. We propose application of these methods to flight software in the context of JPL's Mission Data System (MDS), an integrated systems and software architecture for next-generation space missions.

Specifically, we consider:

? Detection and repair of radiation induced Single Event Upsets (SEU) that can either change data values or code.
? Recovery from bugs manifested as the use of computational resources outside of a specified mode-dependent resource profile.
? Software organization and infrastructure to help diagnose and limit the impact of errors. We shall study how to restructure MDS as a distributed system with redundant hierarchical components.
? A recovery strategy based on component-level rebooting.

This STTR is a cooperative project between the small business Kestrel Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
This technology is relevant to all NASA mission- and safety-critical flight software. The technology will not be specific to MDS. It can improve margins of safety for all critical software.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
The technology is relevant to all safety-critical embedded control systems, now commonly found in automobiles, airplanes, other transportation systems, power plants, etc.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING
Autonomous Reasoning/Artificial Intelligence
On-Board Computing and Data Management


Form Printed on 09-19-05 13:14