On Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022 after a successful launch, the cargo capsule successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS) and the Radiation Tolerant Computer with AI Power Monitoring (RadPC AI) was delivered to the ISS.
See the launch at the link here. RadPC AI, a solution developed in conjunction with Montana State University, has been installed by the astronauts, it is powered up, and collecting data related to the ISS’s electrical power system and space-radiation-induced faults in its processors. RadPC AI provides automatic recovery from these types of faults.
See the presentation Highly Integrateable AI Modules for Planning, Scheduling, Characterization, and Diagnosis (ISS Payload Installation).
The Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) component was created by MSU, while the AI has been developed by Stottler Henke, resulting in the RadPC AI.
The AI fault detection and diagnosis code runs on RadPC and is now on the ISS. This is both to prove RadPC’s ability to recover from radiation faults common in space and to show it could run more complex software than it had previously run. RadPC AI is intended to replace the circa $200K RAD750 radiation hardened processor with equivalent processing power in $100 FPGA chips using soft-CPUs, quadruple redundancy, and FPGA reconfiguration for seamless recovery, achieving 3 orders of magnitude reduction in cost as well as significantly reduced CPU electrical power.