POLITECNICO DI MILANO EMPOWERS THE NEW SPACE PARADIGM WITH THE ERC-POC PROJECT AXESS
Professor Francesco Topputo from the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology of Politecnico di Milano wins another grant from the European Research Council (ERC) with the project AXESS - “Accelerated X-in-the-loop Environment for Spacecraft Systems Testing”.
AXESS has been awarded the prestigious Proof-of-Concept (PoC), a grant accessible solely to the principal investigators of an ERC project. The objective of the PoC is to turn basic research into applied research through a Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS) platform. In 2019, Prof. Topputo won the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant from European Commission worth €2M with EXTREMA – “Engineering Extremely Rare Events in Astrodynamics for Deep-Space Missions in Autonomy”, in 2021 he won the PoC SENSE – “A Sensor for Autonomous Navigation in Deep Space”, and in 2022 he obtained the PoC with GUIDO - “A Computing Unit for Autonomous Spacecraft Guidance in Deep Space”. With AXESS, prof. Topputo brings the number of ERC projects won to four.
EXTREMA will establish the “self-driving CubeSats”, miniaturized spacecraft of the size of a carrying case able to drive themselves during the cruise, from Earth up to the arrival to the destination, without requiring contact with ground. The project, unique in the world, presents many challenges: the nanosatellites (CubeSats) will have to autonomously determine their position in deep space and drive towards the destination with miniaturized propulsion units. EXTREMA will make use of artificial intelligence and sophisticated ballistic capture methods to acquire orbit about planets.
AXESS brings forward EXTREMA’s research which has established the basis for a platform to perform testing of the spacecrafts’ subsystems through services. Testing a subsystem or a technology means ensuring that his operative parameters are within expectancies to avoid anomalies: repairing it in space would be practically impossible. Therefore, it is paramount to certify that the technologies involved are ready to fly by reproducing the mission conditions in a dedicated and relevant simulation environment.
The novelty of AXESS it is his ability to enable flexible, scalable, automatic, and wide-range testing procedures, in a word: X-in-the-Loop. The access to the platform accelerates the space technology development, especially for the emerging industry actors. The PoC AXESS development will be carried out at DART Team, the research group led by Topputo, where guidance and navigation algorithm for space satellites are experimented with integrated hardware-in-the-loop simulations.
The AXESS agile simulation environment and its on-request access has various advantages: the satellites subsystems will not have to undergo a cumbersome integration into strongly specialized test architectures, reducing the time of Verification and Validation (V&V), especially for high-risk high-gain technologies, like the ones of autonomous deep-space probes.
This will dramatically reduce the deployment times of emerging technologies and increase their quality, paving the path towards an exponential scientific return. The AXESS project has already gained the interest of the European Space Agency (ESA) and of the major space companies for their active involvement in its realization and future exploitation.