Probabilistic Guidance of a Swarm Deployed from the Back Shell of a Mars Spacecraft

摘要

This paper presents a probabilistic guidance algorithm for a notional swarm of assets deployed from the back shell of the Mars spacecraft. Such a swarm could provide valuable science data, with large spatiotemporal variation, from the Martian surface. Our probabilistic swarm guidance algorithm maximizes the coverage area of the conceptual swarm while uniformly distributing the assets on the Martian surface and guaranteeing strong-connectivity of the swarm's communication network topology. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our probabilistic swarm guidance algorithm.