VERSES Completes First Phase of Digital Twins Interoperability Project with JPL

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 22, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — VERSES AI Inc. (CBOE:VERS) (OTCQX:VRSSF) (“VERSES” or the “Company”), a cognitive computing company specializing in next generation intelligent systems, announces completion of a research collaboration with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which successfully demonstrated cross-platform interoperability between Digital Twin (DT) systems for lunar explorations. The project is part of a research phase of the Company’s GENIUS™ beta program.

Because of the difficulty of accessing objects in space, DT systems are critical for lunar exploration. DT enables engineers on Earth to manage the health of systems on the Moon and facilitates virtual planning and testing of lunar activities before robotic systems execute potentially dangerous tasks. Furthermore, lunar exploration is evolving into a collaborative international effort and DT has the potential to support testing across organizations globally. The primary challenge to achieving this vision of collaborative lunar exploration is the interoperability between DT systems. In this project, the team from VERSES AI Inc., NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and California State University, Northridge (CSUN), demonstrated real-time joint testing of a lander model at CSUN and a rover DT model at JPL on distributed NVIDIA Omniverse platforms via standard-based spatial web protocols. Additionally, cross-platform collaborations between Omniverse and Unity platforms were demonstrated using these protocols. The team also showcased IP protection by executing a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) model remotely at JPL while testing the model at CSUN.

“We are thrilled to be working with JPL to help unlock the potential for multinational cooperation on the moon,” said Capm Petersen, Chief Innovation Officer, VERSES. “The Spatial Web standards, which GENIUS is the first developer toolkit to support, were designed to address the universal problem of transforming any data, not just geometry and geography, into a unified shared model including the rights and rules that govern the relationships between people, places, and things.”

VERSES, in partnership with the Spatial Web Foundation, worked with JPL researchers to model data using Spatial Web standards with the objective of allowing government agencies, private sector aerospace entities, and universities, each having different technology stacks, to collaborate in a unified real time simulation of the lunar surface.

“Coordination on the moon is a significant unsolved problem. Having developed mapping standards for Earth as the former Chief Technology Officer of the Open Geospatial Consortium, I’m excited to join forces with JPL on exploring how the Spatial Web standards could enable extraterrestrial interoperability,” said George Percivall, Vice-Chair of IEEE Spatial Web Standards Working Group.

The initial results of the collaboration were presented by Dr. Ed Chow, Manager, Civil Programs Office and Principal Investigator at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on July 18th & 19th at the Digital Twins for Cislunar and Lunar Surface Ecosystem Workshop at JPL in Pasadena, California. Attendees included scientists, researchers and experts from aerospace agencies and technologies companies working on digital twins and autonomous agents for lunar explorations.

PwC estimates that the Lunar economy could grow to a $170 billion market in the next 20 years.

VERSES Chief Commercial Officer, Michael Wadden, added, “As far as we know this marks the first demonstration of interoperability between distributed and disparate Digital Twin systems using the spatial web standard.”

Wadden will be presenting a keynote based on the work titled: “Digital Twin Interoperability for Lunar Exploration” at the Digital Twin Consortium third quarter meeting in Chicago, IL on September 12, 2024. Virtual and in person registration can be found here: https://www.digitaltwinconsortium.org/events/q3-2024-member-meeting/