Speaker
Description
The possibilities to observe and interact with any given spacecraft are naturally limited compared to ground-based systems due to a number of factors. These include but are not limited to the availability and bandwidth of their connection to ground, the availability of staff, communication latencies and power budgets.
While a minimum level of autonomy is required for every spacecraft, past experiments and missions have shown that introducing more sophisticated autonomy mechanisms can drastically increase the efficiency for many missions in terms of reliability, science output and required operational effort. This automation can also result in a significant drop of cost for missions that would otherwise require extensive human operation.
The emerging use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components and their increased computational power opens the door for more complex mission scenarios including an increasing number of sensors and actuators to assess and influence the current status. This, however, also enlarges the search space for solutions regarding operation scheduling and planning and to estimate the environmental and health status of the spacecraft up to a degree that cannot be handled manually. Hence, there is an increasing need for mechanisms and algorithms to make spacecraft more self-aware and autonomous. This can also enable mission scenarios that require the spacecraft to come to its own decisions in uncertain environments and to operate without or with only limited human intervention.
The number of techniques and variants of artificial intelligence available in the literature is, however, just as diversified as their potential field of application.
To provide an overview of the current state of the art of artificial intelligence and its application for space systems, this paper provides an extensive survey on existing techniques and algorithms as well as existing and potential applications on board spacecraft and on ground. The survey focuses on autonomous planning and scheduling of operations, self-awareness, anomaly detection and Fault Detection Isolation and Recovery (FDIR), on-board data analysis as well as on-board navigation and processing of earth-observation data.
| Paper submission | Yes |
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