Enabling Interoperable Digital Twins for Collaborative Lunar Exploration ¹

We present the results of a proof-of-concept development for standard-based interoperability between distributed and disparate Digital Twins (DT) systems for lunar exploration. The project was undertaken by a team from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California State University, Northridge (CSUN), Verses AI Inc., and the Spatial Web Foundation. Leveraging the soon-to-be-approved IEEE P2874 Spatial Web standard, the team developed and demonstrated real-time, cross-platform collaborative lunar explorations between DT systems at JPL and CSUN. Using a spatial web plug-in from Verses AI Inc., the team demonstrated real-time joint testing of a lander model at CSUN and a rover DT model at JPL on distributed NVIDIA Omniverse platforms via standard-based spatial web protocols. Additionally, cross-platform collaborations between Omniverse and Unity platforms were demonstrated using these protocols. The team also showcased intellectual property protection by executing a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) model remotely at JPL while testing the model at CSUN. To our knowledge, this project marks the first demonstration of interoperability between distributed and disparate DT systems using the spatial web standard.