The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. For the upcoming 2013 summer the Italian Mars Society (IMS) has been accepted as an official GSoC mentor organization. The projects IMS is proposing relate to the development of the Command, Control and Communication (C3) subsystem as part of the European MaRs Analog Station for Advanced Technologies Integration (ERAS) program, which IMS is currently spearheading. ERAS’ main goal is to provide an effective test bed for field operation studies in preparation for human missions to Mars. The ERAS C3 subsystem will provide the following functionalities:
• monitor and control the habitat’s environment and subsystems;
• monitor and maintain crew health and safety;
• communicate with mission support, rovers, and EVA crew members;
• support data processing related to the mission objectives;
• host the core part of the crew assistant;
We will have four students working with us this summer on projects focusing on advanced Human Machine Interface (HMI) and Machine Learning technologies.
• Ezio Melotti is working on a software allowing the control of a rover via an EEG neuroheadset
• Eric Meinhardt is developing a speech recognition engine for control of rovers during surface-exploration activities
• Simar Preet Singh is implementing optimized neural networks for predicting solar energetic proton events.
• Mario Tambos, who unfortunately could not be financed through the Goolgle program, but who enthusiastically volunteered to participate, will develop, in sync with the other students, detection techniques, such as Multivariate Gaussian Models, for the identification of anomalous situations from space suit biomedical data.
More details on those projects can be found on the ERAS web site dedicated page.
The completion of those project will be a mayor milestone on the development of the ERAS C3 subsystem. We intend to field test the corresponding software during the first available Mars analog field test campaign in collaboration with other space exploration advocacy organizations.
A complete report on the status of IMS GSoC projects will be given at the 16th Annual International Mars Society Convention, August 15-18, 2013 at the University of Colorado in Boulder.