Uplift Systems has partnered with a number of organizations in pursuit of its mission. Here are some of the key ones.

Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS)

PSAS is Uplift Systems' partner specializing in low-cost open hardware/software rockets.

PSAS is an amateur rocketry group. But don't confuse "amateur" with "toy". The current generation of the PSAS rocket (LV2) is hardly a "toy". Here's what PSAS achieved in their last test launch.

• Max speed: Mach 1.4;
• Max height: 45,000 feet (14 miles)
• On-board avionics, including
  • Controller: Debian GNU/Linux PC-104+
  • Six-axis inertial measurement unit
  • On-board GPS
  • Digital telemetry down link

Future PSAS plans include

• Lateral thrusters for roll control
• Oxidizer injection thrust vector controllers for pitch and yaw control.
• Bell-shaped chamber below the nozzle with four oxidizer injectors (useful for generating off-axis unbalanced thrust).

During a previous flight of LV2, the fin canister separated from the airframe around Mach 1. Nonetheless, the rocket flew onwards for several seconds before becoming unstable and crashing. For a nearly stable vehicle such as LV2, it is quite possible that active guidance by an on-board AIVHMS could have taken the rocket to a recoverable flight configuration. There are several ways an AIVHMS can use active guidance to compensate for in-flight emergencies in this system. For example, a persistent steering error due to airframe failure might be resolved by placing the rocket in a spin using the lateral thrusters, or by simply using the thrust vector controllers to counteract the error.

Uplift Systems' developing technologies permit specifying a set of skeletal repair plans (e.g. spin rocket, inject oxidizers) with slots for parameter settings (e.g. spin rate, which oxidisers to use, rate of oxidizer injection). An AIVHMS would then have two tasks: selecting which skeleton to apply and learning appropriate slot parameters.

NASA

In 2005, Uplift Systems completed a Phase I SBIR contract with NASA, producing research and prototypes for a low-cost ultra-lightweight machine-learning-based vehicle health maintenance system.

Quality vehicle health management systems are critical to the successful operation of modern sounding rockets, and other unmanned vehicles. Unfortunately, the software of these systems tends to be complex and rigid and thus expensive and failure-prone, especially given the several real-time constraints of rocketry.

The Magic Bullet Adaptive Intelligent Vehicle Health Management (AIVHM) System, a novel adaptive control system for sounding rockets based on the technologies of treatment learning and Bayes classification. This system will be able to derive an appropriate control strategy for a vehicle in the event of partial system failure.

Our relationship with the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) provides us with a unique opportunity to evaluate and deploy these methods at extremely low cost and with extremely low risk, for simulation and even actual flight testing. The PSAS LV2 rocket has a navigation and control system architecture ideally suited to experimentation with the proposed system.

As senior technical advisory to PSAS, our organization is well-positioned to prototype and deploy the Magic Bullet AIVHMs technology with PSAS. We expect this deployment to result in the information needed to scale the technology to larger, more complex, more demanding avionics applications.

NASA Applications

The Magic Bullet AIVHMS is highly general: it should be useful wherever autonomous vehicles with intelligent VHM are required. Sounding rockets within NASA and elsewhere are prime candidates for the the AIVHMS. We believe that there is a strong potential for NASA to contract for either COTS avionics navigation and control packages containing Magic Bullet technology, or for consulting to apply the technology in-house.

Commercial Applications

Because of its expected simplicity and low cost, the Magic Bullet technology should be of near-term interest to commercial developers of inexpensive, high quality avionics. Groups exploring Unmanned Aerial Vehicle avionics (including NASA) should find the AIVHMS useful. Indeed, almost any kind of unmanned autonomous vehicle, including land and underwater craft, should be able to benefit from Magic Bullet.

While it may be difficult to safety-qualify the Magic Bullet AIVHMS as a primary controller for human flight in the short term, it should nonetheless be usable in controlled-responsibility ancillary systems for commercial avionics.

Partnering With Uplift Systems

Partnering is the core of the Uplift business philosophy. We are exploring new technologies. To sell those technologies, we need case studies. You have hard problems to solve, and you want cheap solutions. We both win if we partner.

You lend us systems to study. We give you innovative adaptive software to better control and monitor those systems. You get better solutions. We get a reference site for future business. And that's a partnership.

(Of course, partnerships must be entered into with some care. Uplift is still a small company and must take great care to carefully assess partnering opportunities.)