TEAMMATE Autonomy for Orbiting Swarms

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to extend our TEAMMATE autonomy for small earth orbiting swarming spacecraft. The decentralized open architecture and AI components provide the essential algorithms (e.g., mission planning, fusion, communications management, asset/sensor control) to enable effective, closed-loop, autonomous, and collaborative decision-making. The planning component computes maneuver, sensor, and effector plans and continually adjusts/re-plans to respond to the ever-changing operating picture. The decentralized fusion component correlates and fuses data generated on the satellite with information received from other satellites; thus, generating a nearly common operational picture for the decision algorithms on each satellite. A communications manager is responsible for sharing data with other satellites. At the core of the system is the sensor control component that determines the optimal set of sensor tasks for a collection of assets but executes only those tasks that pertain to its own sensors. All of the assets operate in this manner, thereby facilitating autonomous behavior without a centralized controller. On this effort, we will extend our autonomy algorithms, software and messages for the orbiting assets, implement new EO and SDA mission tasks, embellish our autonomy testbed and space scenarios, and evaluate swarm effectiveness against earth and space-based adversarial systems.