Spacecraft mission agent for autonomous robust task execution

Autonomy in space systems can drastically reduce the workload of ground crews for satellite missions, especially for clusters of satellites. Additionally, autonomy can increase the efficiency of missions by maximizing the utilization of resources and by rapidly handling any issues that arise without having to wait for instructions from the ground. This research presents an agent-based, task-execution approach to onboard spacecraft autonomy. Instead of the traditional approach requiring onboard planning and scheduling, this method uses a combination of constraint and priority parameters associated with every task to ensure robust task execution with behavior as intended. Using this method, tasks will only run under safe conditions (e.g. no conflict with any running tasks), which allows for conflicting tasks to be scheduled closer together or even overlapping for lower-priority tasks. This approach manages the execution of tasks on the timescale of seconds, allowing conflicting tasks to run sequentially, therefore increasing productivity if earlier tasks finish ahead of schedule. This framework leverages the NASA-developed, open-source projects cFE and PLEXIL and was tested on development boards comparable to flight hardware.