Looking beyond the aerospace and defense industry for more than just inspiration, the Pentagon’s advanced research arm wants to tap a wider population for ideas ranging from spacecraft software to military vehicles.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) calls it “the democratization of innovation.” Others call it crowd-sourcing, the art of outsourcing tasks to a large community of people via the Internet. Examples include open-source software and Wikipedia.

“We seek to create breakthroughs that allow the participation of thousands of designers rather than hundreds . . . and massive innovation, much like the breakthrough of the Internet-enabled massive innovation in the communication and IT industries,” Darpa Director Regina Dugan told Congress in March.

The agency’s first experience with this approach to problem-solving was its December 2009 Network Challenge in which teams formed via social networking had to find the undisclosed locations of 10 balloons across the U.S. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-organized team of nearly 5,400 people found all the balloons in under 9 hr.

Crowd-sourcing of cluster-flight software is one part of a new Darpa program to expand the capability of microsatellites operated onboard the International Space Station (ISS). The agency also plans a vehicle design challenge involving Local Motors, a company that crowd-sources designs for kit cars to be assembled by buyers in local micro-factories.

Darpa also plans to create an open-source environment for the collaborative development of complex systems under the vehicleforge.mil program. The goal is to enable large numbers of unaffiliated developers to design vehicles, aircraft and spacecraft. Such “forge” sites already exist for open-source software.

The Darpa International Space Station Spheres Integrated Research Experiments (Inspire) program represents an initial step in that direction. With the ISS acting as a “satellite wind tunnel,” the goal is to enable rapid, iterative testing of space systems while providing students with an opportunity to perform meaningful space experiments.

Inspire will upgrade the Spheres microsatellites already onboard the ISS. Designed and prototyped by MIT students, the three microsatellites are used for formation-flying algorithm research. They have been on the ISS since 2006 and are operated by astronauts in their free time, for about 12 experiments a year. Now in the Kibo module, the battery-powered microsatellites use cold-gas thrusters to maneuver and an ultrasonic “GPS simulation” to navigate.

The Inspire program has four elements: electromagnetic formation flying; vision-based relative navigation; a design study for “Exo-Spheres” microsatellites that could fly outside the ISS; and a design challenge to involve high school students in the development of algorithms for the Spheres spacecraft.

Two of the Spheres satellites will be equipped with steerable magnetic coils that will enable them to maneuver relative to each other by generating forces and torques via electromagnetic coupling. In a cluster of satellites, such as Darpa’s System F6, this would allow a formation of modules to maneuver in space by wirelessly coupling to one thruster-equipped spacecraft.

The vision-based relative navigation project will involve two microsatellites circumnavigating the third and using sensors to build a 3D model of the target Sphere. This will enable the two Spheres to navigate relative to the third by visual reference—matching images to the model—and allow formation flight in the absence of precise GPS positioning.

The Exo-Spheres design study will be an undergraduate project to prototype the next-generation Spheres testbed, which would be able operate for short periods outside the ISS. “They would throw them out of the Kibo airlock, perform experiments and use the small Japanese robotic arm to retrieve them,” says Paul Eremenko, a Darpa program manager.

But for Darpa’s drive to democratize innovation, the fourth aspect of Inspire is the most interesting—a tiered competition in which high-school teams will compete at local, regional and national levels, with the winning algorithms to be tested using the Spheres satellites on the ISS.

“Can we change the way we design things, and bring a bigger number of non-traditional people into the process? We can show that high-school students can do meaningful algorithm development,” says Eremenko. As an example of crowd-sourcing, the planned Spheres challenge is “a first attempt at democratization in aerospace,” he says.

Photo Credit: NASA