Demonstrating Autonomy for Complex Space Missions: A Europa Lander Mission Autonomy Prototype

Abstract

There is a desire for robotic spacecraft to perform exploration in unknown, dynamic environments. The Europa Lander Mission Concept is one such mission that needs to deal with an extremely limited lifetime and energy supply, manage intermittent communications with long blackouts, face numerous environmental dangers, and ultimately take place too far from Earth to rely on human control. No missions to date have operated with the required level of autonomy and under the same level of communication constraints, uncertainty, and mission concept complexity as this mission. As a result, the viability of the autonomy must be demonstrated before it will be trusted with mission-critical planning. In this paper, we present an autonomous software prototype that can demonstrate and test the ability of different planners and executives to carry out complex, science-centric missions with limited interventions from humans. The prototype uses a hierarchical utility model that is used to maximize both the amount of expected science return as well as the number of mission objectives imposed by the ground. We demonstrate how this system handles some of the autonomous tasks expected of complex space missions such as decision making, in-situ data acquisition and analysis, data prioritization, resource management, and failure response handling in both simulation and on actual hardware. Through several scenario-based experiments we show how different planners and executives can meet the challenges of the Europa Lander Mission Concept. We also demonstrate that this system can be used in concert with a hardware prototype for autonomy field tests.