Ontology-Based Self-Reconfiguring Guidance, Navigation, and Control for Planetary Rovers

Abstract

Certain limitations exist in autonomous software and guidance, navigation, and control architectures developed for extraterrestrial planetary exploration rovers in regard to fault tolerance, changes in environment, and changes in rover capabilities. To address these limitations, this paper outlines a self-reconfiguring guidance, navigation, and control architecture, using an ontology-based rational agent to enable autonomous reconfiguration of mission goals, software architecture, software components, and the control of hardware components during the run time. This new architecture was evaluated through implementation onboard a rover and tested in challenging, Mars-like environments, both simulated and real world, and was found to be highly reliable, fault tolerant, and adaptable

Mission Operations and Autonomy

“…The self-managed software architectures is currently a vibrant field that covers a number of distinct solutions such as service-based [52][53][54], aspect-oriented component-based [55], generic component-based [56,57], model-based [58][59][60], self-organization [61,62], and ontology-based [63][64][65]. Each of the methods approaches the problem in a different manner.…”

“…The more recently developed system reconfiguration concept is ontologybased [63][64][65],. which mainly consists of an application layer representing the ordinary system with user-defined modules and a network layer representing components integral to the reconfiguration.…”

“…This helps demonstrate the assortment of reconfiguration systems against different measures and classifications. For example, the more recently developed ontology-based method [63] has demonstrated a complete coverage of relevant attributes for system reconfiguration hence is described in detail in the next section using a design example.…”

“…In this section, a self-reconfiguring GNC system for planetary rovers is presented as a design example to demonstrate the state-of-the-art ontology-based reconfigurable autonomy [63,64] and its application. This technique exhibits a complete coverage of required attributes for reconfiguration systems as shown in Table 6.5 and can work with generic GNC techniques presented previously in Chapters 3 and 4.…”

Robotics and AI-Enabled On-Orbit Operations With Future Generation of Small Satellites

“…However, this could be circumvented if a system could autonomously solve errors and reconfigure itself. One such approach has recently been proposed and successfully tested on autonomous planetary rover mockups [117], [118]. Here, the onboard software can reconfigure itself by tracking data from sensors and actuators.…”