Cooperative Control and Localization of Multiple Spacecraft using a Multi-Agent Mission Operations System

Multi-satellite swarms are becoming very popular due to their low costs and short development time. Instead of large and costly monolithic satellites, small satellite swarms can be flown as distributed sensing platforms for atmospheric sampling, distributed antennas, and synthetic apertures among other exciting applications, delivering an even greater mission capability. This project contributes to the development and demonstration of a mission operations system for robust, coordinated operation of mobile agent swarms in dynamic space environments. Through a collaboration with the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, Interstel Technologies Comprehensive Open-architecture Solution for Mission Operations Systems (iCOSMOS) will be enhanced to coordinate and control swarms of space vehicles and other assets. The proposed iCOSMOS-Swarm will enable systematic motion planning, robust state estimation, and coordination for multiple agents. The major tasks include (1) the development of a scalable multi-agent coordination module to coordinate, control, and guide a large agent swarms, a multi-nodal software architecture for diverse (heterogeneous) assets, and a multi-agent state estimation module for robust navigation, (2) enhanced system performance with improved data handling and synthesis, message passing and dynamic nodal configuration, and (3) significantly enhanced simulation capabilities to support up to dozens of simultaneous nodes, end-to-end simulation of 20 satellite nodes in real time or up to 1000x real time or more, and full visualization of the mission plans before execution. The anticipated results include the software source code for iCOSMOS-Swarm and the results from a baseline benchmark missions with one microsat and 4 CubeSats to collect dynamic, multi-dimensional data sets over a wildfire outbreak or similar events through the use of multiple detectors, spread out in time, space and spectrum.

iCOSMOS-Swarm will enable scalable mission control supporting multiple and heterogeneous assets simultaneously. This coordination improves support for remote sensing of terrestrial or planetary missions (Earth, lunar, Mars), utilizing diverse NASA assets such as aerial, ground, subterranean, and underwater agents. Example missions include tracking of dynamic events (e.g. wildfires) and monitoring of environmental conditions (e.g. climate change) where swarms of agents will provide improved remote sensing outcomes over large areas and volumes.

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