Gillette, Antony
(2019)
Spacecraft Mission Agent for Autonomous Robust Task Execution.
Master's Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
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 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 enables 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, enabling conflicting tasks to run sequentially, thereby 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.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
18 June 2019 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
1 April 2019 |
| Approval Date: |
18 June 2019 |
| Submission Date: |
25 March 2019 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
51 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Swanson School of Engineering > Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| Degree: |
MS - Master of Science |
| Thesis Type: |
Master's Thesis |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Space, Autonomy, CubeSat, Satellite, Schedule, Planning |
| Date Deposited: |
18 Jun 2019 17:22 |
| Last Modified: |
18 Jun 2019 17:22 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/36112 |
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