Space Force selects GURU and Princeton to Build the Future of Immersive Collaborative Training for Space Flight Operations

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 18, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- MSBAI, an Air Force Techstars 2020 company, and partner Princeton University, have been awarded a 1.25 million dollar Phase 2 contract from SpaceWERX, in the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) X22.D cycle to bring the game-changing advantage of GURU, an Autonomous system that Drives expert workflows in Software, to space flight mission training scenario generation and visualization. GURU will bring autonomy to simulation and visualization workloads to meet demand coming from the worldwide radical increase in space missions.

U.S. Army General James H. Dickinson, Commander of U.S. Space Command, made the importance of training space flight mission operators clear when he said "U.S. Space Force, the Space Development Agency, and other key stakeholders must lead DoD efforts to build comprehensive military space power through a trained, equipped, and ready force that is integrated into Joint Force plans to support the Department's objectives to compete, deter, and win across the spectrum of conflict."

MSBAI and Princeton will work closely with the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate's (AFRL RV) Defense Readiness Agile Gaming Online Network (DRAGON) to hyper-enable their White Cell Trainer group to set up comprehensive mission design, analysis, and training scenarios in minutes (work that typically takes hours, and sometimes days, to accomplish).

The volume of both commercial and government space missions is growing exponentially, and teaching trainers with varying amounts of experience to create effective space flight mission operations training scenarios is a challenging task that requires careful planning and adaptation. This can lead to inconsistencies, gaps, and inefficiencies in the training process. To solve this MSBAI and Princeton will adapt GURU to solve the following problems:

• Creating compelling training scenarios is laborious and time-consuming
• It's easy to make mistakes and not catch them soon enough without comprehensive visualization
•  Trainers need to increase the rate of training iterations, and rehearsal

GURU will hyper-enable the user to easily create training scenarios, create comprehensive visualizations, and replay past training scenarios for analysis. To seize this opportunity, the high barriers to entry must be completely solved. Doing so will drive commercial collaboration, innovation, and rapid deployment of new technologies. The outcome of this effort will:

• Provide a user-friendly intuitive system with multiple visualization options for space operations
• Integrate with AFRL's White Cell Console to autonomously drive the simulation tools
• Create comprehensive visualizations of training scenarios (2D & 3D)
•  Build and manage a library to store and replay simulations for later analysis

MSBAI trains comprehensive skills agents that autonomously drive expert workflows in an increasing number of software titles. This effort requires the integration of a variety of simulation software packages critical to space flight, including open source and commercial software like GMAT and Cesium. GURU will autonomously drive simulation setup and execution, making extensive use of DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) resources, and particularly supercomputers at AFRL DSRC. Immersive virtual world building will play an important role to maximize team understanding and collaboration through collaborative visualization, and GURU will autonomously drive software such as Unreal Engine for this purpose, ultimately supporting spatial computing and mixed reality experiences using the latest devices such as Apple's Vision Pro, Meta's Quest 3 and Ray-Ban Wayfarer.

Princeton University's Professor Ryne Beeson of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, brings his expertise in the mathematical theory of differential games (DG) and space flight mission design and analysis, providing guidance on data and scenario creation for studies in relevant differential games. His team will conduct research on the formulation of representative differential games for current space domain awareness (SDA) and courses of action (CoA) in Earth bound and cislunar environments.

Allan Grosvenor, MSBAI CEO, said

"Our team could not be more proud to be part of the future of space operations by hyper-enabling trainers analysts and operators to have a fast onramp to the best mission design and analysis tools, and to use them quickly and collaboratively."

This effort is consistent with a wider global trend in the scale up of immersive virtual world training, with a market size expected to reach one Trillion dollars. The commercialization opportunity from just the Unreal Engine component of this work addresses several million worldwide users, and commercial space demands this level of autonomy as space flight operations become as routine as commercial airline traffic.

About AFRL
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is the primary scientific research and development center for the Department of the Air Force and United States Space Force. AFRL plays an integral role in leading the discovery, development, and integration of affordable warfighting technologies for our air, space, and cyberspace force. With a workforce of more than 11,000 across nine technology areas and 40 other operations across the globe, AFRL provides a diverse portfolio of science and technology ranging from fundamental to advanced research and technology development. For more information, visit: www.afresearchlab.com.

About SpaceWERX
SpaceWERX is the Space component of AFWERX (a program office at the Air Force Research Laboratory-AFRL) which connects innovators across government, industry and academia. Through innovation and collaboration with our nation's top subject-matter experts and harnessing the power of ingenuity of internal talent, by expanding technology, talent, and transition partnerships for rapid and affordable commercial and military capability. Additional information is available at: https://www.spacewerx.us/.

References

Senate Armed Services Committee Advance Policy Questions for U.S. Army General James H. Dickinson is the Commander, U.S. Space Command
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Dickinson_APQs_07-28-20.pdf 

1 Trillion Dollar Virtual Immersive Training Market Size
https://www.verifiedmarketresearch.com/product/virtual-training-and-simulation-market/
https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/report/virtual-training-and-simulation-market

MSBAI (dba for Microsurgeonbot Inc.) develops GURU http://msb.ai [email protected]

Princeton's Prof. Ryne Beeson https://mae.princeton.edu/about-mae/spotlight/ryne-beeson-optimizing-spaceflight

SOURCE MSBAI