Reusable Schedule Design and Execution Framework for Autonomous Mission Management in Space

Abstract

Aerospace mission autonomy can improve mission capabilities, reduce the burden on ground operators, and prevent mission failure when encountering unexpected situations. However, autonomy comes at the cost of additional complexity for design, development, and testing. This research presents an autonomous mission framework to bridge the gap between existing aerospace mission systems and emerging autonomous paradigms. Traditional aerospace missions without custom autonomy solutions generally follow rigid schedules, and tasks are executed during specified time windows. For these types of scenarios, the only task constraint is the current time. Our proposed framework, called the Schedule Manager, expands on this concept by adding additional constraint checks such as conflict, priority, and resource constraints. Through the design and upload of task schedules, constraint tables, and contingency schedules, the benefits of autonomy can be achieved without deviating significantly from the standard, thereby simplifying the adoption, integration, and safety analysis process. This framework was integrated and tested with NASA’s core Flight System and 42 spacecraft simulator, and run on development boards comparable to flight hardware.