Software Engineering Institute

In 2014-2015, a group of researchers across various disciplines gathered at the Caltech Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) to explore whether recent advances in multifunctional, reconfigurable, and adaptive structures could enable a microenvironment control to support space exploration in extreme environments. The workshop series spawned multiple working groups and project ideas for pushing the state-of-the-art in space exploration, colonization and infrastructure. One such project, called the Multi-planetary Smart Tile, explores the possibility of creating a multi-functional power grid for the solar system that is capable of distributed computation, renewable power generation, and power beaming to remote locations. In this podcast, Dr. James Edmondson discusses his work to bring distributed artificial intelligence to a next generation, renewable power grid in space.