• Safety-critical applications, such as aircrafts and unmanned space vehicles require a high degree of reliability and performance
• Such applications require fusing data from a large number of sensors and dealing with these data reliably in real time
• Temporary errors and permanent damages in associated electronics can result in disasters. Temporary errors often result from ionizing radiations in space, the upper atmosphere or nuclear environments. All these are hostile to electronic systems, leading to events that can be detrimental to the overall functioning of the system
• Reconfigurable hardware like the FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) can be used to achieve high performance and at the same time, adapt electronic systems to errors

Reconfigurable Operating Systems

• A Reconfigurable Operating System (ROS) is built upon a reconfigurable hardware. It gives to hardware a “software look”
• Existing ROSes have limitations in:
  • Reliability,
  • Flexibility,
  • Real-Timeness,
  • Security, and so on
• Our solution to this is the R4THOS, a Robust Reliable Reconfigurable Real-Time Heterogeneous Operating System
• The initial target for this research has been the NASA/JPL's CIRIS spectrometer targeted to detect life on Jupiter’s moon, Europa

R4THOS at a Glance

• Reliable → Correct temporary errors, and circumvent permanent damages
• Flexible → Use a unique on-chip communication
• Real-Time → Use a predictable computing model