RocketSmith: An Agentic System for High-Powered Rocket Design and Manufacturing
For hobbyist or small-scale rocket developers, this system automates design-to-manufacturing workflows, but the results are incremental and limited to a small number of test cases.
RocketSmith is an agentic system that automates design, manufacturing, and optimization of high-powered rockets, achieving stable launches for all four test rockets and 84% accuracy in apogee prediction compared to simulations.
This work presents RocketSmith, an agentic system capable of the design, manufacturing, and optimization processes in high powered rocket development. The system enables the intelligent automation of software tools as to not only validate factors such as flight stability but also generate the parametric design components for the rocket assembly. A collection of subagents and skills enable optimization workflows of flight parameters via iteration in both zero-shot and human-in-the-loop workflows. With this system, four distinct high power rockets with various motor and assembly configurations were developed utilizing the unique design capabilities of additive manufacturing. These assembly components were fabricated using various FDM printers, manually evaluated for flight readiness, and flight tested at a launch event. From these tests, all rockets achieved a stable launched and two of the four rockets were successfully recovered in reflyable condition. Within the collected flight data, an 84% accuracy was achieved when comparing measured apogee to that calculated in flight simulations.