Autonomous Recovery from Spacecraft Plan Failures by Regulatory Repair While Retaining Operability

Abstract

Pre-designed spacecraft plans suffer from failure due to the uncertain space environment. In this case, instead of spending a long time waiting for ground control to upload a feasible plan in order to achieve the mission goals, the spacecraft could repair the failed plan while executing another part of the plan. This paper proposes a method called Isolation and Repair Plan Failures (IRPF) for a spaceship with durable, concurrent, and resource-dependent actions. To enable the spacecraft to perform some actions when a plan fails, IRPF separates all defective actions from executable actions in the pre-designed plan according to causal analysis between the failure state and the established plan. Then, to address the competition between operation and repair during the partial execution of the plan, IRPF sets up several regulatory factors associated with the search process for a solution, and then repairs the broken plan within the limits of these factors. Experiments were carried out in simulations of a satellite and a multi-rover system. The results demonstrate that, compared with replanning and other plan-repair methods, IRPF creates an execution plan more quickly and searches for a recovery plan with fewer explored state nodes in a shorter period of time.