kai

Early in the development of SIMOC we recognized the need to differentiate various kinds of food. While it it is the ultimate goal to track energy from fats, sugars, and proteins, we are immediately concerned with distinguishing food from rations, meaning, the food grown in-hab from the food brought from Earth. This sounds simple enough, yet it invokes a function not yet implemented in SIMOC—the ability to prioritize one currency over another in the presence of both.

SIMOC team member Grant Hawkins took on this challenge and this week complete made major strides with the effort, which invoked a moderate redesign of the means by which agents (e.g. Humans) consume their respective currencies (e.g. food, rations, water, etc.). As such, local food is the first priority for consumption, but if depleted, the humans return to consumption of rations.

Initiated in early October, the Arizona State University undergraduate Computer Science Capstone team, in concert with Ezio, Grant, and Kai of the SIMOC development team have completed a second-draft work-flow for the sensor array to be embedded in the Space Analog for the Moon and Mars (SAM) at Biosphere 2.

This design will continue to evolve as SAM is constructed and the SIMOC team dives into real-world sensor tests in place of the current SIMOC simulated data. Stay tuned!

The SIMOC development team has added the long-awaited 3D view of the habitat, available to the user both while configuring the habitat and on the SIMOC simulation dashboard. Users enjoy a dynamic visual representation of the habitat provided by space architecture designer Bryan Versteeg of SpaceHabs, such that as they select varied sizes of the habitat components, the image updates.

We are pleased to welcome David Wingar, Gregory Ross, Ian Castellanos, Meredith Greythorne, and Ryan Meneses to the SIMOC team for the next nine months. They will be working with SIMOC developers Ezio Melotti and Grant Hawkins to build a new back-end to the SIMOC web interface, providing a live data feed from the array of sensors in SAM, the hi-fidelity Mars habitat analog being constructed at the Biosphere 2.

As the SIMOC team transitions from Phase IV into Phase V development, we are shifting design and coding gears from a year spent principally in improving the scalability and stability of the SIMOC deployment across Google Cloud Platform coupled with several improvements to the user interface, back into an effort to more closely define the agent interactions, improving their real-world representation.

Learn more …