ANTS for Human Exploration and Development of Space

Abstract

The proposed Autonomous Nano-technology Swarm (ANTS) is an enabling architecture for human/robotic mission envisaged by NASA's mission for the Human Exploration and Development of Space (HEDS). ANTS design principles draw on successes observed in the realm of social insect colonies, which include task specialization and sociality. ANTS spacecraft act as independent, autonomous agents for specific functions, while cooperating to achieve mission goals. For example, the Prospecting ANTS Mission (PAM) is a long-term mission concept for the 2020-2025 time frame involving individual spacecraft agents that are optimized for specific asteroid prospecting functions. The objective of PAM is to characterize at least one thousand asteroids during each year of operations in the main belt. To achieve this objective, PAM spacecraft, individually and as a group, must achieve a high level of autonomy. This high degree of autonomy opens the possibility of a new kind of interaction between humans and these spacecraft, where human explorers and developers could interact with ANTS enabled resources by communicating high-level goals and data products. Thus ANTS enables new kinds of missions in which human and robotic agents work together to achieve mission goals. In this paper we review and discuss the ANTS architecture in the context of the HEDS mission.