Organizations are increasingly adopting digital twin and digital thread technologies to manage the system lifecycle, improve traceability, and develop a single source of truth. “Digital acquisition holds the key to unleashing the speed and agility we need to field capability at the tempo required to win in a future conflict with a peer competitor,” wrote Darlene J. Costello, acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force (Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics) in an Air Force memo in May 2021. Clearly, digital engineering is important to the future of most industries especially the aerospace and automotive industries. However, most organizations are challenged when implementing a DE solution. This is often due to the lack of integration in tools and the tools only provide manual model creations. The key to successful implementation is a seamless integration between the necessary software solutions, data-driven solutions, and collaboration between teams. Dr. Steven Dam sought to prove that digital engineering is possible and not costly to implement.
In this session, Dr. Dam will demonstrate a successful implementation of digital engineering in the aerospace and automotive industry. SPEC Innovations’ team of systems engineers developed a lunar rover system architecture designed to excavate icy regolith and extract water for creating a sustainable source of water on the surface of the Moon. The end-to-end digital engineering and MBSE tool, Innoslate, was utilized to research and design, build, and test a lunar rover prototype. Requirements in Innoslate’s Documents View were written to define the rover system’s functionality. Action diagrams were created to model and simulate the lunar mission to determine how long the proposed lunar rover system would take to collect 10,000 kg of water on the lunar surface. Innoslate’s Test Center was beneficial in recording tests conducted in the lab and in the field to verify and validate the lunar rover prototype. Further lower-level design analyses were also conducted using Innoslate’s various integrations with other tools such as STK, MATLAB, and Ansys. Having a well-integrated systems and design engineering environment reduced prototype development time and cost significantly throughout the project.
The Space Prospect Exploration Convoy Transporting & Evaluating Regolith (S.P.E.C.T.E.R) prototype developed by SPEC Innovations represents the first rover to explore and excavate the southern pole of the Moon with the goal of producing a collection of water to sustain future life on the Moon. The rover can navigate the unpredictable terrain of the Shackleton crater and endure the extreme conditions of the lunar surface to engineer the Moon's first sustainable water source. This mission will be the first step toward supporting human life on the Moon and demonstrates a successful implementation of digital engineering.