The resilient extraterrestrial habitats research institute (rethi) will harness promising next-generation technological advances to overcome the grand challenge of deep space habitation

By leveraging world-leading expertise in developing civil infrastructure responsive to catastrophic natural hazards and merging IT with leaders in the fields of modular and autonomous robotics platforms smart buildings hybrid simulation complex systems and diagnostics and prognostics we will develop and demonstrate the transformative technologies needed to design and operate resilient deep space habitats that can adapt absorb and rapidly recover from expected and unexpected disruptions to deep space habitat systems without fundamental changes in function or sacrifices in safety. To achieve this vision the rethi team will pursue the following tightly-integrated research objectives: 1) establish a comprehensive resilience framework to support resilient design operation and management while anticipating a habitat that evolves and grows over time; 2) conduct the research and development necessary to establish smart habitats that autonomously sense anticipate and respond under a variety of manned and unmanned configurations; 3) develop decision-making techniques that can weigh alternatives for complex interconnected interdependent habitat systems while also understanding and when necessary combating the natural human instinct to interfere or override automated systems; and 4) contribute to the NASA mission to educate the next generation of engineers and scientists while building partnerships with US industries and organizations and other nations and generate data products that will inform and guide future research and development. To accomplish these goals we will employ the latest approaches in resilient design automated and coordinated robotics machine learning intelligent system monitoring and adaptive control. These parallel but interconnected efforts will converge in the establishment of a cyber-physical testbed that integrates physical models with virtual models to systematically develop deploy and validate principles of resilience and autonomous detection and corrective capabilities. Rethi s headquarters will be at purdue university s discovery park. Participant universities will include the university of connecticut harvard university and the university of texas SAN antonio. Through this integrated effort rethi will facilitate deep space habitats with embedded autonomous capabilities that have the ability to operate in both manned and unmanned configurations rapidly and safely transitioning between those states when needed. Rather than evaluating subsystems or components independently rethi will establish a new approach system resilience that will be the turning point in achieving permanent deep space habitats for long term human settlement that are more cost-effective and more responsive to unforeseen events. The institute will serve as a hub for world-class research private and public partnerships and project-based learning by distributed teams of students all focused on the resilience of complex systems that are built from and depend upon the synergy of computational and physical components.