Architecting Autonomy for Safe Microgravity Free-Flyer Inspection
🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a hierarchical autonomous planning and control architecture to address the safety and reliability challenges faced by small free-flying vehicles performing extravehicular inspection tasks near sensitive space infrastructure in microgravity environments. The architecture systematically translates high-level mission requirements into concrete design decisions, explicitly accounting for velocity limits, pointing constraints, and no-fly or restricted zones. A complete autonomy stack is realized through cost-function-based motion planning and trajectory control strategies. Its key innovation lies in the first direct mapping of real-world orbital inspection requirements to the planning and control layers, augmented by multi-tiered safety mechanisms to handle model uncertainties and potential failures. Simulation results demonstrate that the approach achieves efficient and safe autonomous inspection capabilities while satisfying practical constraints such as computation time and propellant consumption, offering a reusable system blueprint for future close-proximity on-orbit servicing missions.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Small free-flying spacecraft can provide vital extravehicular activity (EVA) services like inspection and repair for future orbital outposts like the Lunar Gateway. Operating adjacent to delicate space station and microgravity targets, these spacecraft require formalization to describe the autonomy that a free-flyer inspection mission must provide. This work explores the transformation of general mission requirements for this class of free-flyer into a set of concrete decisions for the planning and control autonomy architectures that will power such missions. Flowing down from operator commands for inspection of important regions and mission time-criticality, a motion planning problem emerges that provides the basis for developing autonomy solutions. Unique constraints are considered such as velocity limitations, pointing, and keep-in/keep-out zones, with mission fallback techniques for providing hierarchical safety guarantees under model uncertainties and failure. Planning considerations such as cost function design and path vs. trajectory control are discussed. The typical inputs and outputs of the planning and control autonomy stack of such a mission are also provided. Notional system requirements such as solve times and propellant use are documented to inform planning and control design. The entire proposed autonomy framework for free-flyer inspection is realized in the SmallSatSim simulation environment, providing a reference example of free-flyer inspection autonomy. The proposed autonomy architecture serves as a blueprint for future implementations of small satellite autonomous inspection in proximity to mission-critical hardware, going beyond the existing literature in terms of both (1) providing realistic system requirements for an autonomous inspection mission and (2) translating these requirements into autonomy design decisions for inspection planning and control.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
autonomy architecture
free-flyer inspection
microgravity
spacecraft safety
mission constraints
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
autonomy architecture
free-flyer inspection
motion planning
microgravity operations
safety guarantees
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