IN-PASS: Intelligent Navigation, Planning, and Autonomy for Swarm Systems

IN-PASS improves the effectiveness of heterogeneous swarms of collaborating lunar orbital and surface assets. Assets can be surface rovers, satellites, and static surface nodes providing localization, communication and data processing services. Formal-methods-based algorithms are employed to determine asset plans that balance performance, resource use, and safety. Autonomous Planning System (APS) decentralized mission autonomy plans, deconflicts and coordinates collection tasks and data orchestration across the swarm. Event-Trigged Decentralized Data Fusion (ET-DDF) helps swarm assets maintain a high-degree of team state knowledge with minimal data exchange. Phase II-E efforts will build on the IN-PASS architecture of Phase II, adding support in several key areas. To meet space situational awareness needs in any planetary or moon orbital environment, the APS onboard planning and data orchestration framework will be extended to support collaborative sensor searches employing novel strategies that allow either manifold areas or complex volumes to be optimally collected on using a federated team of networked sensors (space or surface based) with different characteristics and perspectives. The multi-asset rover navigation planner developed in the Phase II effort will also be extended to cope with situations where absolute positioning of assets is only sporadically available (GPS-denied), utilizing relative measurement data collection, exchange, and fusion as a supplemental MDP planning constraint. Finally, the APS framework will be extended to include support for fault detection and mitigation, allowing the health of individual team members to be considered when formulating initial plans, or when dynamically adapting to ad-hoc fault events.
Benefits: IN-PASS applies to missions with autonomous control, coordination, and localization of heterogenous assets operating in dynamic environments: planetary surface exploration, survey, sampling, and characterization; surface collaborative infrastructure construction/repair; planetary orbital asset collaboration for optimized/event-based space-ground sensor collection/processing; convoys of spacecraft en-route to solar system destinations; coordinating science team behaviors for faults/anomalies. IN-PASS is suitable for small or large swarms. Collaborative Earth observing satellite constellations, coordinated space/ground sensor systems supporting enhanced space situational awareness, coordination of data chain orchestration for data analytics, collaborative autonomous maritime (surface and underwater) missions, coordination of teams of ground orbits and/or air vehicles for science, fire detection/mitigation, search/rescue.