Engineering student wins space conference award
Published: 16 October 2023
Giorgio Ciacchella awarded for Best Interactive Presentation at the International Astronautical Congress 2023
Giorgio Ciacchella, an Electronic and Software Engineering student and member of GU Orbit, has won the Best Interactive Presentation Award at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC2023) in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Giorgio's work, co-authored by fellow UofG students Alzahraa Mohammad and Szymon Zurawski, is titled: "An open-source method for model-based development of embedded systems: experience report from a CubeSat student project", and it is part of GU Orbit's development of a student nanosatellite.
The interactive presentation can be seen here.
Giorgio said:
We wanted to address the critical gap between high-level model-based systems engineering and low-level embedded software development. The Model-Based philosophy is all about consistency, but limiting it to the design stage as a specification for coding is an opportunity for bugs to sneak in.
Our work bridges this gap by exploiting the similarities between two specific tools: Capella, an MBSE toolkit initially developed by Thales and now maintained by the Eclipse Foundation; and TASTE, a model-based embedded software develoment toolchain managed by the European Space Agency and contributed to by multiple academic and industrial partners.
We built upon previous seminal work to assemble a V-shaped workflow spanning the entirety of the engineering lifecycle through design, implementation, verification and validation phases, and applied it to develop the flight software on the sounding balloon we just launched with GU Orbit.
As undergraduates, we were already happy that our abstract had been accepted to the conference, so you can imagine the disbelief when the poster actually won the award!
Congratulations Giorgio and team!
First published: 16 October 2023
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