Integrated Planning and Execution for Autonomous Spacecraft

An autonomous spacecraft must balance long-term and short-term considerations. It must perform purposeful activities that ensure long-term science and engineering goals are achieved and ensure that it maintains positive resource margins. This requires planning in advance to avoid a series of shortsighted decisions that can lead to failure. However, it must also respond in a timely fashion to a somewhat dynamic and unpredictable environment. Thus, in terms of high-level, goal-oriented activity, spacecraft plans must often be modified due to fortuitous events such as early completion of observations and setbacks such as failure to acquire a guidestar for a science observation. This describes an integrated planning and execution architecture that supports continuous modification and updating of a current working plan in light of a changing operating context.     

Coordinated Continual Planning Methods for Cooperating Rovers

Eight evaluation metrics are used to compare and contrast three coordination schemes for a system that continuously plans to control collections of rovers (or spacecraft) using collective mission goals instead of goals or command sequences for each spacecraft. These schemes use a central coordinator to either: 1) micromanage rovers one activity at a time; 2) assign mission goals to rovers; or 3) arbitrate mission goal auctions among rovers. A self-commanding collection of rovers would autonomously coordinate itself to satisfy high-level science and engineering goals in a changing partially understood environment - making the operation of tens or even a hundred spacecraft feasible     

Design of optimal midcourse guidance sliding-mode control for missiles with TVC

This work discusses a nonlinear midcourse missile controller with thrust vector control (TVC) inputs for the interception of a theater ballistic missile, including autopilot system and guidance system. First, a three degree-of-freedom (DOF) optimal midcourse guidance law is designed to minimize the control effort and the distance between the missile and the target. Then, converting the acceleration command from guidance law into attitude command, a quaternion-based sliding-mode attitude controller is proposed to track the attitude command and to cope with the effects from variations of missile's inertia, aerodynamic force, and wind gusts. The exponential stability of the overall system is thoroughly analyzed via Lyapunov stability theory. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed guidance law and the associated TVC.     

Time variations of the total electron content in the Southeast Asian equatorial ionization anomaly for the period 2006–2011

This study presents the time variations of the total electron content in the South East Asian equatorial ionization anomaly. The time variation of the TEC is analyzed through the period 2006–2011 by using a latitudinal chain of GPS stations extending in the northern and southern hemisphere. The data shows that the shape of the diurnal variation of the TEC depends on the latitude: a plateau is observed at the stations near the equator and a Gaussian at the station distant from the equator. We observe a semiannual pattern in all the stations with maxima at equinox. In both hemispheres, the amplitude of the crest is larger in spring than autumn from 2006 to 2008 and smaller in spring than in autumn from 2009 to 2011. We also observe an asymmetry between the amplitude and the position of the two crests of ionization. There is a very high level of correlation between the amplitude of the TEC at the two crests and the sunspot number: ∼0.88. During the deep solar minimum 2008–2009, the amplitude of crests of ionization becomes small during several months in summer and winter. The results show that both crests move significantly equatorward in winter than other seasons and there is a tendency for both crests to appear earlier in winter and later in summer.     

Failure Isolation for a Minimally Redundant Inertial Sensor System

The application of two-degree-of-freedom inertial sensors in a minimally redundant strapdown configuration is considered. The potential improvement in reliability which can be achieved by exploiting the failure isolation capability unique to this configuration is evaluated. A unified, statistical approach to the detection and isolation of both hard and soft sensor failures is presented. The effectiveness of this unified approach to FDI in terms of the mean time to detection, the mean time between false alarms, and the accumulated attitude error prior to detection is indicated by simulation results.