Autonomy Requirements

NbCars 144291 NbWords 25847 FileName SummaryReport.doc  Astrium SUMMARY The Autonomy Requirements For Future Constellation Study has been performed by ASTRIUM SAS prime and LAAS and ONERA academic institutions as subcontractors. The main objective of this study was to analyse future constellations autonomy requirements and identify key technologies. To support this analysis, two future constellations have been selected (Galileo and Darwin) and associated requirement derived in the fields of Planning/Scheduling, On board diagnosis and reconfiguration, AOCS/GNC, data handling and validation. As the requirements of the two target constellations were relatively limited, a more detail analysis of the future requirements in these fields was achieved to identify future needs and associated missions. The repartition of functions between space and ground and the motivation that shall guide the design choices have been reviewed. The candidate architecture of such autonomous system have been derived from state of the art developments in the space domain and in other domains having similar requirements (robotics, aeronautics). For each of the main components of an autonomous system, a review of the current technology developments and trends has been performed to identify the critical areas for future autonomous systems. This document present a synthesis of the main conclusions of this study and the proposed technology roadmap. The roadmap identifies the main technologies required in the near and long term. The main conclusion of the review performed is that in many specialized domains, the technology required is already available for near term developments, and that the main problems are the migration from research to industry and the interfaces betweens the technologies. This is why the main recommendation of the roadmap is to apply these technologies on a real size demonstrator involving all the actors (operators and technology domains specialists) which can be used as a development platform to compare and test new technologies. It can also be used to demonstrate the actual capability of autonomous systems for project manager (and enable an evaluation of the developments risks) in order to promote design of new missions taking advantage of the new technologies capabilities. Recently, space mission autonomy has been pushed by several experiments and developments in the United States like the Deep Space One autonomy experiment. Autonomy is felt mandatory to enable most of the future space missions. There are many motivations for improved autonomy, the two major being: reduction of operation costs and improved reactivity to sensed data. Constellations …