Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Advanced navigation and manufacturing technologies are positively impacting almost every industry except the space industry due to a lack of space heritage and confidence. My long-term research vision is to empower the space industry with new control technologies that will reduce the cost and design cycle for space systems, leading to a more accessible space industry. My short-term goal in the next 5-year cycle is to develop predictive navigation and control technologies for drones in support of space exploration. Robotic space exploration has historically used a variety of exploration tools, including orbiters, landers, rovers and impactors / penetrators. However, our ability to cover wide areas of terrain at high spatial resolution has been limited to the short range and slow speed of planetary rovers. The fledgling space mining industry could one day provide valuable minerals that are not accessible or available on Earth, provided robotic explorers have adequate coverage capability to survey and sample the soil. Drones have the potential to greatly extend the reach of robotic exploration through their ability to cover vast areas quickly and efficiently, as evidenced by the dramatic growth of the commercial drone industry in recent years. This proposed research program will empower the Canadian aerospace industry with technologies to deploy and control flying drones as a means of exploring new extraterrestrial bodies. Unlike drones for Earth, extraterrestrial drones will face numerous challenges. Unpredictable weather, unknown obstacles, differing air density / composition, unmapped magnetic fields, inability for human/drone interaction and the lack of a global positioning system make commercial drone solutions unsuitable for extra-terrestrial use. I plan to develop new drone control technologies that adapt to and predict changing conditions without any human interaction. I will design drones optimized for interplanetary exploration, develop predictive controllers that use fractional calculus to anticipate nonlinear dynamics and hardware failures and develop a drone navigation system based on measurements from rovers and orbiters. Armed with these technologies, the Canadian Space Agency and their industrial partners will be able to offer cost effective exploration technologies to international space exploration partnerships. My students will evaluate the suitability of our drone technologies using my indoor drone testbed. This unique facility offers a safe, hands-on, hardware testbed to evaluate drone designs and control strategies in a controlled environment, providing a unique and valuable training opportunity for Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP). When combined with my robust network of industrial collaborations through my Industrial Research Chair, these HQP will gain the skills required to continue with academic research in space exploration technologies, or enter industry directly as leaders in drone and space technology.