Raspberry Pi Pico Lecture 27 (2025): Chipsats

0:00 - Plan for today’s lecture 1:25 - The context in which a defense presentation is given 3:25 - What are these presentations supposed to explain? 4:45 - Articulating contributions 6:25 - Questions I hope to answer 6:45 - What is a chipsat? 7:45 - The tool is the swarm of chipsats, not the individual chipsat 8:40 - What are the open research questions associated with swarms of chipsats? 9:40 - What makes these questions interesting? 10:40 - Articulating the difference between chipsats and conventional spacecraft in the language of ecologists 16:15 - Where do we place chipsats in the evolutionary history of small spacecraft? 17:30 - Standing on the shoulders of giants 18:20 - A brief history of chipsat hardware 22:10 - Introducing the Monarch chipsat 23:00 - Features and capabilities of the Monarch chipsat 29:50 - Classes of missions for which chipsats are well suited 31:00 - An algorithm for moving data among a swarm of chipsats 32:00 - An observation about the mathematical models for swarms of chipsats vs. conventional spacecraft 33:30 - To what information can we assume each chipsat has access? 35:15 - Framing the routing problem as an optimal stopping problem? 36:00 - Deriving an optimal routing policy 36:50 - Demonstrations of the routing policy in action 37:50 - Relationship to Dyson Spheres 39:30 - Is a sufficiently advanced computer distinguishable from nature? 40:00 - Utility of chipsats for planetary impact missions 41:20 - Would chipsats survive impact with the Moon? 43:45 - Suppose the probability of surviving impact is nonzero, how do we design missions? 45:10 - Thinking about mission assurance as probabilistic heat maps 46:55 - Conducting some proof-of-concept experiments on Earth 47:45 - An agricultural version of the Monarch 48:30 - Why would vineyards want something like this? 49:30 - Data from the first vineyard deployment 50:20 - Data from a subsequent deployment 51:45 - Comparing overnight data from Monarchs and weather stations 52:45 - Putting them also on cows 53:40 - SpinLaunch collaboration and IMAX movie Spring, 2025 lectures from ECE 4760 (Digital Systems Design Using Microcontroller) at Cornell University. Course site: https://ece4760.github.io Hunter’s site: https://vanhunteradams.com