Development of a Cyber–Physical Testbed for Smart and Resilient Space Habitats

The Resilient Extra-Terrestrial Habitats Institute (RETHi) has developed and commissioned the Human-centered Autonomous Resilient Space Habitat (HARSH), a shared-use cyber–physical testing facility, to enable researchers interested in the technologies needed to establish smart habitats to test their approaches on a reconfigurable testbed. Due to the challenges in replicating conditions and requirements of Lunar, Martian, or other mission scenarios on the Earth and the complexity of the systems that comprise a space habitat, these types of experiments are best conducted through the use of cyber–physical testing methodologies, where some portions of the system under consideration are physical and others are numerical or cyber. Therefore, HARSH is a partly physical and partly virtual system-of-systems testbed that allows for a broad range of conditions and disruptions to be examined in a controllable manner. The testbed is designed to have systems that are damageable and repairable, allowing researchers to investigate digital twin construction and updating, fault detection and diagnosis, decision-making, state estimation, predictive modeling, design considerations, human interfaces, or some combinations of these. This paper reports on this novel cyber–physical testbed that has been developed to enable the strategic examination of the coupled dynamics of complex systems through the simulation of disruption scenarios with cascading events, aimed at advancing our knowledge of how to autonomously operate complex systems.