Stress-Sharing: A Bio-Inspired Approach to Decentralized Fault Repair in Modular Spacecraft

2026-07-15

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of decentralized autonomous repair in modular spacecraft following structural damage, where global information or absolute positioning is unavailable. Inspired by biological wound healing, the authors propose a fully distributed repair strategy that models the spacecraft as a lattice-constrained graph. Local stress signals emitted by damaged regions guide neighboring healthy modules to fill vacancies, while a distributed motion backtracking algorithm restores the original configuration—all without reliance on global knowledge. This approach represents the first integration of biological stress-response mechanisms into spacecraft self-repair, offering inherent scalability for large-scale systems. PyBullet simulations demonstrate that, even under 30% random module failure in systems comprising up to 160 modules, over 80% of surviving units successfully coalesce into a single connected structure, with repair performance improving as system size increases.

Abstract

Structural damage in modular spacecraft can disrupt mechanical and communication connectivity, reducing system capability. Existing approaches rely on redundancy or preplanned reconfiguration and do not enable autonomous repair under local information and physical constraints. We model the spacecraft as a lattice-constrained graph and introduce a fully decentralized, asynchronous stress-sharing repair policy inspired by biological wound healing: local distress signals guide surviving modules toward damaged regions to close fragmented gaps, after which each displaced module locally retraces its own motions to recover the pre-damage shape, using only local information and no absolute position sensing. We evaluate the policy in PyBullet rigid-body simulation across structures of up to 160 modules, three fault densities (10, 20, 30%), and random and localized damage. The policy consolidates the surviving modules into a single connected body: even in the most severe case tested, where 30% of modules fail at random, it gathers roughly 80% or more of the surviving modules into one connected component, and this fraction improves with assembly size, making the approach well suited as a swarm-scale repair policy for large modular spacecraft.

Problem

• modular spacecraft
• structural damage
• decentralized repair
• autonomous fault recovery
• local information constraints

Innovation

• stress-sharing
• decentralized repair
• modular spacecraft
• bio-inspired
• local information