Technological advances allow on-board systems to becoming more and more autonomous, not only for the navigation and attitude control activities of a spacecraft, but also in the pre-processing of data to be transmitted to ground stations. In the big data era, on-board pre-processing is a de facto need in modern satellite platforms. The availability of low power high resolution sensors for remote sensing, high data rate instruments, a variety of cameras generating a huge amount of pixels to be compressed, among other data intensive operations, result in the need of multi-processed architectures, similar to the ones used in ground level applications.

However, the reliability and energy requirements in the space environment are stricter, placing the research on this type of parallel processing architecture at the knowledge frontier. Reliability improvement and system processing acceleration features are often achieved through redundancy. The implementation of traditional redundancy strategies, usually results in an increase in the energy consumption. In space applications, where energy is a scarce resource, both reliability and processing power improvements must be carefully designed and this compromise is a major research challenge to be conducted at the SpaceLab. The multidisciplinary nature of the field is an inspiration for unfolding new research topics, and to investigate new technologies, which could be useful also in other application fields as, for instance, autonomous robots guidance, self-driving cars, among others. In the group, there are on-going theses related to space systems in general, including on-board computer architectures of satellites (software and hardware), mechanical and thermal aspects of spacecrafts.