Editorial: Computational Intelligence For Space Systems and Operations
Editorial: Computational Intelligence For Space Systems and Operations
Editorial: Computational Intelligence For Space Systems and Operations
Yang Gao University of Surrey, UNITED KINGDOM Nicola Policella ESOC-ESA, GERMaNY Frank Kirchner DFKI, GERMaNY
urrent and future space missions require an increasing level of autonomy or intelligence distributed across the space systems that have computing capabilities to implement intelligent functionalities for decision making. Such computational intelligence (CI) allows spacecraft (vehicles and robots alike) to respond rapidly to opportunistic events in deep space when remote operations are not practical due to communication latency, or to enable ground operators to optimize complex mission (e.g. involving multiple spacecraft) planning and scheduling processes, and so on. Typical CI approaches that can be used to improve spacecraft autonomy include mathematical, probabilistic and statistical modeling, control, automation and optimization, safety and reliability, system identification, monitoring and fault detection, etc. There are therefore strong motivations to develop these expertise areas for answering to the research challenges posed by astronautics and space engineering. The ECSS1 has defined four level of autonomy for a space system, ranging from direct operator control of all actions to the systems control of decision-making and action with only subsequent human intervention (see detailed definition in Table 1). Although space system autonomy is often assimilated to
1 The European Committee for Space Standardization (ECSS) was created in 1993 as the European organization responsible for the creation and publishing of standards for space projects. See http://ecss.nl/.
The IEEE Task Force on Intelligent Space Systems and Operations aims to identify design requirements and drivers of CI approaches for space, and drive in particular original and theoretical research in CI for space systems/ operations where reliability and robustness are key.
its space (or on-board) segment, the ground segment can play a crucial role as well. If performance of a space system need to be assessed, it is necessary to conceive the system as a whole and consider implications for the ground segment when the level of autonomy at the space segment is increased. In addition, a sufficient level of autonomy within the ground segment is often required by the operations of autonomous spacecraft. In the past two decades, major space agencies have undertaken development in intelligent software employing CI techniques that can demonstrate high autonomy level (i.e. E4 according to the ECSS standard). For example, NASA 2 has designed goal-oriented planners such as EUROPA, ASPEN and CASPER, which subsequently led to real mission operation software RAX and ASE, etc. More recent research endeavor is to extend and apply these designs to address more complex space systems involving multiple spacecraft, such as the MISUS project for multi-rovers. ESA3 has also funded development of the planning software framework APSI, and design studies GOAC and IRONCAP built on APSI framework for future planetary rover missions.
2 3
Major research activities have also been carried out by space industries, research institutes and universities all over the world. Taking Mars exploration missions as an example, the increase in autonomy level of the rover systems (from Sojourner of NASA in 1997 to future ESA ExoMars and sample fetch rovers) has noticeably improved rover traverse rate per sol as illustrated in Figure 1. The IEEE Task Force on Intelligent Space Systems and Operations4 was set up within the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society to promote the research, development, education and understanding of applications of computational intelligence in space systems and operations. The major goals include establishing more clear definitions of the emerging field, identifying design requirements and dr ivers of CI approaches for space, and driving in particular original and theoretical research in CI for space systems where reliability and robustness are key. This special issue aims to present latest research work from the scientific community that tackle space engineering problems using CI techniques. The three articles selected from twenty submissions cover a good range of applications on Mars sample
4
www.nasa.gov www.esa.int
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ssc/activity/ieee_isso/index.htm
10
1556-603X/13/$31.002013ieee
E2
E3
E4
return rover, Asteroid exploration vehicle to Earth formation flying satellites. The first article entitled Efficient Energy Management for Autonomous Control in Rover Missions describes the results of a study that applies advanced autonomous reasoning capabilities to robotics planetary exploration. Since autonomy address challenges like automated planning, diagnostics, monitoring, and machine learning and so on, the planetary rover domains represent very relevant and common case studies. In this article the authors use a constraint-based heuristic search for synthesizing complete plan sequences by reasoning upon a wide set of realistic requirements and constraints. Starting from the Mars Sample Return (MSR) requirements, they define a scheduling problem, the Power Aware Resource Constrained Mars Rover Scheduling (PARC-MRS) problem. Following the defined problem, the authors formulated a scheduling algorithm that focuses on a number of results belonging to previous research, and provides an extension of a well-known constraint-based, resourcedriven procedure which exploits poweraware reasoning capabilities within an integrated resolution strategy, where a wide variety of complex temporal and resource constraints are considered, with special attention to the energy requirements. An exhaustive experimentation shows the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, as well as the effectiveness of an optimization schema in providing minimum-make span solutions. Another secondary result of the study is the creation of a meaningful benchmark of PARC-MRS problem instances tailored on the MSR domain.
Average Speed per Sol 124 120 98 Speed (m/sol) 73 48 30 20 1 1.2 10 5.8 18.4 19.2 50 92 90 90
Sojourner
MER
MSL
ExoMars
SFR
FIGURE 15 Planetary rover exploration speed is improved with the increase of rover autonomy level (the bottom line shows the average rover speed taking into account locomotion and science sols; top and middle lines only consider locomotion sols, and represent the maximum average and nominal average rover speed respectively).
The second paper proposes an approach that utilizes deliberative agentbased architecture integrated with world model and set of possible actions in terms of natural language representation with potential applications in complex environments. The proposed architecture has been implemented using autonomous asteroid exploration as a case study. The agent-based architectures formalize the relationship between an autonomous system (an agent), operating environments (that provide percepts) and agent actions (that may bring about changes in percepts) and hence (if applied in the correct
5
manner) can prove to be a useful paradigm for CI in autonomous space systems development. Several highlights of the paper include using generic programming, development and deployment platforms, natural language programming for higher-level symbolic representation, and performing validation and verification via Gwendolen. The third paper, Optimal Satellite Formation Reconfiguration Based on Closed-loop Brain Stor m Optimization applies brain storm optimization (BSO) to the fixed time fuel optimal reconfiguration of a satellite formation
ISBN: 978-84-695-3472-4.
11
December 912, 2014 Place: Orlando, Florida, USA General Chair: HaiBo He http://www.ieee-ssci.org/
* 2015 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games (IEEE CIG 2015)
August 31September 2, 2015 Place: Tainan, Taiwan General Co-Chairs: I-Chen Wu, Chang-Shing LEE, and Shun-Chin Hsu Website: TBD
www.ieee.org/open-access
63