Leveraging the Space Plug-and-Play Avionics (SPA) Standard to Enable Constellation-Level Collaborative Autonomy

摘要

On-orbit autonomy depends on the timely availability of situational awareness data. Data provided from ground stations, derived from telemetry from other spacecraft, need to be evaluated in conjunction with the real-time telemetry available from various subsystems on the spacecraft bus. Having direct access to telemetry from other spacecraft dramatically increases an autonomy engine's ability to make decisions based on near-real-time information and information from multiple sources with heterogeneous capabilities. SPA is well suited to provide a platform to support spacecraft autonomy on several levels. It provides an abstraction layer between the autonomy engine and each spacecraft subsystem. This decoupling allows simplified reuse of the autonomy engine on future missions as well as reducing design-time efforts to develop the bus since interfaces between the bus and the autonomy system are standardized. Introducing a Constellation Collaboration Manager (CCM) activity agent as a SPA-compliant application on the bus allows telemetry from other spacecraft, including telemetry from component types not available on the local spacecraft, to be available as inputs to an autonomy engine in the same abstracted manner that local telemetry is available. This allows an autonomy engine to base its decisions on a much broader range of data and increase the range of scenarios that can it can handle. The telemetry available can be optionally pre-filtered or processed into aggregate information either by the CCM on the spacecraft broadcasting its telemetry or on the receiving spacecraft before it is sent to the autonomy engine. The CCM also opens additional options for autonomy engines by allowing them to generate tasking requests for other spacecraft in addition to its local spacecraft. Since the CCM is a SPA-based component, it can be added to an existing SPA-based system with minimal or no impact to other components on the bus.