April 23, 2026
A Reconfigurable Avionics Testbed for Small Spacecraft
A modular hardware-in-the-loop platform for studying resilient onboard computing and fault response.
Sinuous has completed the first integration phase of a reconfigurable avionics testbed for small-spacecraft research. The platform is intended to shorten the path between autonomy experiments in simulation and repeatable tests against representative embedded hardware.
The current configuration combines a flight-computer surrogate, software-defined sensor interfaces, programmable power channels, and a separate fault-injection controller. It can reproduce timing drift, packet loss, sensor dropout, processor resets, and constrained power states without modifying the software under test.
A common environment for software and hardware
Autonomy research often changes character when it leaves a workstation. Memory pressure, scheduling jitter, communication delays, and recovery behavior become part of the problem. The testbed allows the same mission scenario to run first in simulation and then through hardware in the loop, with synchronized telemetry for comparison.
The initial checkout campaign focused on deterministic replay and measurement integrity. Across repeated runs, timestamp alignment remained within the target tolerance for the present phase. Longer-duration stability and thermal behavior have not yet been characterized.
Planned work
Upcoming tests will examine autonomous mode transitions during combined sensor and power faults. We are also preparing an interface for processor-in-the-loop experiments using radiation-tolerant and commercial computing modules.
The platform is a laboratory research asset, not flight-qualified hardware. Its purpose is to expose integration failures early and make autonomy claims easier to test under controlled conditions.