Autonomous Target Revisiting Planning for LEO Observing Constellations Based on Improved Contract Network Protocol

Natural environment monitoring is one of the important applications in the field of earth observation satellites. Such targets often require periodic monitoring, which is a long-term target revisiting problem. With the enhancement of satellite technology, autonomous collaborative planning on multi-satellites becomes possible, which can effectively achieve continuous observation of large-scale targets. Based on this, the paper focuses on multi-satellite cooperative autonomous mission planning for target revisiting problem. By constructing a “heat map” reflecting the urgency of target observation, the long-term task planning is transformed into a short-term task planning based on time-domain rolling. By dividing satellite clusters, setting up multi master satellites to establish a two-layer task allocation structure, and introducing the contract network protocol as an interaction and negotiation mechanism between satellites. Some improvements are made in the process of contract network protocol to solve its disadvantages in satellite applications, and the corresponding task assignment algorithm is designed. Simulation results show that the improved contract network protocol can achieve good task allocation effect and significantly reduce the inter satellite communication.