Service-Oriented Architecture for Space Exploration Robotic Rover Systems

Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development costs. Robotics is yet another promising and fast-growing industry that deals with the creation of machines that operate in an autonomous fashion and serve for various applications including space exploration, weaponry, laboratory research, and manufacturing. It is in space exploration that the most common type of robots is the planetary rover which moves across the surface of a planet and conducts a thorough geological study of the celestial surface. This type of rover system is still ad-hoc in that it incorporates its software into its core hardware making the whole system cohesive, tightly-coupled, more susceptible to shortcomings, less flexible, hard to be scaled and maintained, and impossible to be adapted to other purposes. This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture for space exploration robotic rover systems made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to the actual rover; the server tier that corresponds to the web services; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an Enterprise Service Bus which promotes interoperability between the interconnected entities. The niche of this architecture is that rover's software components are decoupled and isolated from the rover's body and possibly deployed at a distant location. A service-oriented architecture promotes integrate-ability, scalability, reusability, maintainability, and interoperability for client-to-server communication.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences, http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Science & Emerging Technologies (IJSET), Vol. 3, No. 2, February 201

Spacecraft servicing demonstration plan

A preliminary spacecraft servicing demonstration plan is prepared which leads to a fully verified operational on-orbit servicing system based on the module exchange, refueling, and resupply technologies. The resulting system can be applied at the space station, in low Earth orbit with an orbital maneuvering vehicle (OMV), or be carried with an OMV to geosynchronous orbit by an orbital transfer vehicle. The three phase plan includes ground demonstrations, cargo bay demonstrations, and free flight verifications. The plan emphasizes the exchange of multimission modular spacecraft (MMS) modules which involves space repairable satellites. Three servicer mechanism configurations are the engineering test unit, a protoflight quality unit, and two fully operational units that have been qualified and documented for use in free flight verification activity. The plan balances costs and risks by overlapping study phases, utilizing existing equipment for ground demonstrations, maximizing use of existing MMS equipment, and rental of a spacecraft bus

Virtual Machines and Networks - Installation, Performance Study, Advantages and Virtualization Options

The interest in virtualization has been growing rapidly in the IT industry because of inherent benefits like better resource utilization and ease of system manageability. The experimentation and use of virtualization as well as the simultaneous deployment of virtual software are increasingly getting popular and in use by educational institutions for research and teaching. This paper stresses on the potential advantages associated with virtualization and the use of virtual machines for scenarios, which cannot be easily implemented and/or studied in a traditional academic network environment, but need to be explored and experimented by students to meet the raising needs and knowledge-base demanded by the IT industry. In this context, we discuss various aspects of virtualization - starting from the working principle of virtual machines, installation procedure for a virtual guest operating system on a physical host operating system, virtualization options and a performance study measuring the throughput obtained on a network of virtual machines and physical host machines. In addition, the paper extensively evaluates the use of virtual machines and virtual networks in an academic environment and also specifically discusses sample projects on network security, which may not be feasible enough to be conducted in a physical network of personal computers; but could be conducted only using virtual machines

The UARS and open data concept and analysis study

Alternative concepts for a common design for the UARS and OPEN Central Data Handling Facility (CDHF) are offered. Costs for alternative implementations of the UARS designs are presented, showing that the system design does not restrict the implementation to a single manufacturer. Processing demands on the alternative UARS CDHF implementations are then discussed. With this information at hand together with estimates for OPEN processing demands, it is shown that any shortfall in system capability for OPEN support can be remedied by either component upgrades or array processing attachments rather than a system redesign. In addition to a common system design, it is shown that there is significant potential for common software design, especially in the areas of data management software and non-user-unique production software. Archiving the CDHF data are discussed. Following that, cost examples for several modes of communications between the CDHF and Remote User Facilities are presented. Technology application is discussed