Applications
ASG beyond automotive
The same control architecture, in machines outside the car. Not a product line today, but worth setting out.
In one sentence ASG controls any group of distributed electromechanical parts joined by a single energy network. That is not specific to cars: it holds for any machine whose actuators have to act as one body.
Not tailored, but applicable
ASG today is engineered for the road vehicle: its qualification, its connectors and its safety targets are automotive. The domains on this page are not productised, and nothing here should be read as a claim that ASG is flight-qualified or mission-ready.
What carries across is the architecture. Wherever a machine has many distributed actuators that must move together, on bounded timing, with as little harness as possible, the same design applies.
Aerospace
Aircraft, rotorcraft and launch vehicles are real-time vector position control problems: control surfaces, rotor and swashplate actuation, engine gimbal, grid fins and reaction-control thrusters, all commanded against a trajectory. The value of a synchronous single ring here is the same as in a car, with harness mass and fault isolation weighing even more heavily. The all-electric aircraft concept is the same move this architecture makes for the vehicle.
The communication approach ASG is built on is not new to spaceflight. An early implementation of this style of synchronous distributed control was part of the control system for an autonomous spacecraft landing that set a world record. That heritage is one reason the timing model is conservative.
Robotics
A robot is many joints and sensors that only do useful work when they move as one system. ASG controls them synchronously rather than as a network of separate, loosely-connected controllers, so the whole machine has one current model of itself.
The practical gain is in the software. A behaviour is one program written against the complete, known state of the machine, not an integration exercise across several controllers with their own buses and message sets. Every electrical node is on the one network, so compatibility is the default rather than something to engineer per part.
What carries over, and what would need work
Carries over unchanged
- The synchronous commit: one shared machine state, rewritten every millisecond, read by every module.
- One ring carrying power and data on the same medium, in place of a point-to-point harness.
- The electronic fuse: a bounded local reaction that disconnects a fault without relays.
- Universal control modules, their role set by position and software rather than by part number.
- One program written against a complete, known state, rather than many controllers to orchestrate.
Would need engineering
- Environmental qualification: vibration, thermal range, radiation, altitude and pressure for the target domain.
- The functional-safety and certification regime, which differs by industry and is not automotive ISO 26262.
- Connector, cable and enclosure standards specific to airframes, launch vehicles or robots.
- Redundancy and fault-tolerance architecture matched to the mission, beyond the automotive baseline.