Resilient Autonomous Mission Management for Decentralized Multispacecraft Missions

Abstract

Autonomy will play a crucial role in achieving complex mission goals and reducing the burden for ground operations for upcoming ambitious aerospace missions. Standalone spacecraft can leverage autonomy concepts to optimize data collection and ensure robust operation. Autonomy can additionally provide a feasible method of ensuring coordination for spacecraft clusters through onboard peer-to-peer scheduling. The core of this framework, the schedule manager (SM), manages tasks by associating constraints with each task including time windows, task priority, conflict categories, and resource requirements, which assures that tasks will only run when capable. This increased control over individual tasks also improves the modularity of the overall mission plan and provides a built-in fail-safe in the event of unexpected task failure through the loading of predefined contingency schedules. Various other capabilities were added to the SM, including the SM data server to simplify commanding, distributed coordination, and integration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s core Flight System (cFS) platform. Software validation was achieved with cFS unit tests, functional tests, and code analysis tools. Demonstrations were tested with a cluster of development boards in the loop as representative flight hardware.