Spacecraft mission agent for autonomous robust task execution

Abstract

Autonomy in space systems can drastically reduce the workload of ground crews for satellite missions, especially for clusters of satellites. Additionally, autonomy can increase the efficiency of missions by maximizing the utilization of resources and rapidly handling any issues that arise without having to wait for instructions from the ground. This research presents an agentbased, task-execution approach to onboard spacecraft autonomy. Instead of the traditional approach requiring onboard planning and scheduling, this method uses a combination of constraint and priority parameters associated with every task to ensure robust task execution with behavior as intended. Using this method, tasks will only run under safe conditions (e.g. no conflict with any running tasks), which enables conflicting tasks to be scheduled closer together or even overlapping for lower-priority tasks. This approach manages the execution of tasks on the timescale of seconds, enabling conflicting tasks to run sequentially, thereby increasing productivity if earlier tasks finish ahead of schedule. This framework leverages the NASA-developed, open-source projects cFE and PLEXIL and was tested on development boards comparable to flight hardware.