SpaceDrones Lab
SpaceDrones Lab is a collaborative laboratory that enables multidisciplinary research for small satellites and autonomous space applications.
Its researchers leverage cutting edge technology to provide a combined hardware and software testbed facility and spacecraft simulator to be used by investigators across multiple engineering disciplines including but not limited to electrical, aerospace, ocean, mechanical, and many others.
The SpaceDrones Laboratory was established in the summer of 2018. Starting as an internship project from Space@VT, Virginia Tech students led by Gustavo Gargioni and Marco Peterson. They put together the first version of the spacecraft simulator that we call today SpaceDrones version 1. This version is still used for several graduate research, including masters’ theses and Ph.D. dissertations.
After the summer of 2018, some students contributed to expanding the scope of the spacecraft simulator proposing new vehicles or upgrading the current generation. In 202, the lab began collaborating with ICAT; a year later, it moved into Experience studio (Moss 161), the current ICAT facility hosting it.
The Lab is directed by research fellow Kevin Schroeder.
Projects conducted herein:
Defend the Republic Competition -2024
The Autonomous Multi-vehicle Cooperative System (AMCOS) project is a research-focused program to develop methods and algorithms that enable cooperation within a team of agents with limited computational power and communication bandwidth. Given the fact that underwater unmanned vehicles are costly and difficult to use for rapid prototyping due to the high resource requirements – costs, programming, transportation, deployment, on-site staff (dive and command crew), etc. – system development was done on a surrogate platform with many similarities to UUVs. For the AMCOS program, lighter-than-air (LTA) vehicles were used to demonstrate the system's capabilities in the semi-annual Defend the Republic (DtR) competition.
CCI BattleDrones Competition - 2023
Students from Virginia Tech, George Mason University, and Old Dominion University participated in the competition. The program was aimed at offering students a hands-on educational opportunity focused on the intersection of cybersecurity, autonomous systems, and data. There is a rapidly growing worldwide market for drones and autonomous systems. These large markets will require new expertise in security, autonomy, and data and are therefore centered on CCI's aims of developing and enhancing workforce development programs across the Commonwealth. The competition provides a scalable experiential learning program to address the Cybersecurity Workforce Development Program's objective to fuel significant talent pipeline efforts that impact large numbers of students to address the cybersecurity workforce gap and increase the diversity of the talent pool for cybersecurity positions.
A hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) - 2022
HiL is the testbed for an On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM) demonstration. The proposed HiL technologies use augmented reality and multi-rotors as surrogate free-flying spacecraft. The system leverages modern GPUs on single-board computers, single-board computers small enough to be mounted to small-scale flight systems. Equipped with a solid-state LiDAR-camera sensor suite, the surrogate spacecraft can extract detailed pose and relative location measurements from the output of a trained CNN. The far-field optical scene is generated to capture the complex on-orbit environments, including dynamic lighting, and is developed with and projected in the CUBE.