Challenge

Upcoming space missions and concepts require fast exploration and validation, demanding data driven approaches. The space market’s needs are poorly addressed by the commercial data centre market, limiting collaboration and stunting the growth of UK companies internationally.

There is a need for a place with dedicated hardware, specialised software and the ability to easily collaborate across organisations whilst IP remains protected. To facilitate large-scale complexity, there also needs to be a shift from desktop hardware to high performance compute infrastructure to accommodate the scale required.

COSDAC (Collaborative Space Data Centre) was funded by the UK Space Agency’s Space Cluster Infrastructure Fund. Through engagement with stakeholders from industry, we gained greater understanding of the challenges faced by the industry and what could be implemented to solve them, addressing critical gaps in space and advanced systems engineering applications.

Solutions

COSDAC is a fully-equipped digital workshop for AI, robotics and ConOps exploration, as well as development and testing for space missions. COSDAC speeds up development times, increases collaboration, removes the IT burden and enables access to data centre-level robotics hardware and software.

Example use cases include:

• Deep learning based training and inference for space data classification
• Onboard or remotely at huge scale
• Robot in the loop and sensor simulation testing
• Dedicated-edge based processing board testing
• Specialist HPC enabled digital modelling at scale
• Fleet-based robotic system design
• Multi-user virtual collaboration and system integration

Impact

COSDAC has enabled several space-related projects. Our Large AI Space and Robotics Simulator (LARS Sim) is hosted on COSDAC enabling scaled simulation of robotics applications. It is also being used for other research projects spanning from planetary scale mapping of geological features on Mars, to robotic path planning