Iterated Bidding-based Autonomous Mission Planning of Multiple Agile Earth Observation Satellites

To address the autonomous mission planning (AMP) problem of multiple agile earth observation satellites (AEOSs) with a large batch of tasks, this paper presents a novel AMP framework based on an improved contract net protocol (CNP) with an iterated bidding mechanism. In this framework, the bidding task distribution rules, the bidding strategy and four bid evaluation strategies are proposed. Meanwhile, four experiments with different bid evaluation strategies are designed and successfully completed on the real onboard processors based on the existing single-satellite AMP technology. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to get satisfactory planning results and has important practicality in the real application.