Spacecraft Development and Mission Planning
The main focus of the department "Software for Space Systems and Interactive Visualization" is on the investigation of software-based processes for the design of space systems. Beside the development of innovative approaches for Concurrent Engineering which leads to a first complete design in consideration of all engaged disciplines of engineering sciences, the research on complex frameworks for the evaluation of software in the loop (SiL) as well as hardware in the loop (HiL) using static and dynamic simulation models is one of our core activities. To increase the efficiency of such frameworks and to decrease the total cost, ways are investigated to integrate libraries of reusable simulation modules with unified and standardized interfaces.
Onboard Software Systems
For the development and research of new approaches for the design of space systems, embedded systems like on-board software for satellites plays a central role. The focus here is primarily on testing, the analysis of safety critical components, and robustness evaluation of real-time software. The efficiency of the embedded software developed in the department could already be proved by a real fault treatment of the already flying BIRD satellite.
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)
With the help of VR systems, planned space systems can be visualized instantly. Those VR scenarios can be enriched with visualizations of simulation results of various research fields. Furthermore Immersive Virtual Environments offer a direct interaction approach. With the help those human machine interfaces, the user can manipulate the visualization interactively and in real-time. Besides planetary and atmospheric science, numerous additional use cases exist. Contemporary hardware and software is used for displaying the virtual environments.
Scientific Visualization
Scientific visualization is a crucial step for post-processing of large simulation and measurement datasets. Single workstations are not capapible of loading and processing such amount of data. This is one of the motivations to investigate distributed post-processing environments. In-situ processing while simulations are running may be a first step for an efficient visualization pipeline. We are also carry out research for accurate feature extraction methods helping to reduce large datsets to meaningful visualization primitives. And parallelization increases performance considerably. Eventually, data streaming showing partial data at the engineer's desktop while data are still processed on the high-performance computer can improve interactivity.