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The knowledge bank of ESA’s R&D programmes

High performance avionics solution for advanced and complex GNC systems (HIPNOS)

Programme
Discovery
Programme Reference
13-121
Contractor
Start Date
End Date
Country
Spain
High performance avionics solution for advanced and complex GNC systems (HIPNOS)
Description

The objective of this document is the presentation of the final synthesis of the activity “HIPNOS”, Development of a representative HW/SW solution for a high-performance processing platform for Active Debris Removal missions. Implement COTS-based solution as Demonstration of the activity.
HIPNOS includes trade-off study of processing technologies, processing space-grade and COTS devices, processing architectures, trade-off for computer vision algorithms, and demonstrator of the selected solution.
The scope and objectives of the activity are:
- -study/define the high-level architecture of a high-performance computing system for space avionics for GNC in ADR missions
- design one high-accuracy & high-complexity chain of Computer Vision algorithms to support the ADR scenario of e.Deorbit
- select the most appropriate acceleration platform in terms of speed, power, rad-hardness, mass/size, flexibility, future trends
- accelerate the CV algorithms on FPGA or GPU, or DSP, or multi-core CPU to achieve the high- speed processing required in ADR
- develop and demonstrate a preliminary, proof-of-concept system (by using COTS components and high-definition videos) with a representative ADR use-case.
- present the feasibility of implementing demanding algorithms with real-time performance on future space-grade platforms
This work has been performed under the ESA contract No. 4000117700/16/NL/LF. The consortium participating in this project was formed by GMV Aerospace and Defense as prime, and the Greek universities of NTUA and FORTH as subcontractors.

Executive summary