Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Swarms in Space Missions
New NASA mission concepts now being studied involve many small spacecraft
operating collaboratively, analogous to swarms in nature. The swarm concept
offers several advantages over traditional large spacecraft missions: the ability
to send spacecraft to explore regions of space where traditional craft simply
would be impractical, greater redundancy (and, consequently, greater protec-
tion of assets), and reduced costs and risk, among others [
176
,
181
]. Examples
are as follows:
•
Several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying approximately 1 m above
the surface of Mars, which will cover as much of the surface of Mars in
minutes as the now famous Mars rovers did in their entire time on the
planet
•
Armies of tetrahedral walkers to explore the Martian and Lunar surface
•
Miniaturized pico-class spacecraft to explore the asteroid belt
Under these concepts for future space exploration missions, swarms of
spacecraft and rovers will act much like insects such as ants and bees. Swarms
will operate as a large group of autonomous individuals, each having simple,
cooperative capabilities, and no global knowledge of the group's objective.
Such systems entail a wide range of potential new capabilities, but pose un-
precedented challenges to system developers. Swarm-based missions, with a
new level and kind of complexity that makes untenable the idea of individ-
ual control by human operators, suggest the need for a new level and kind
of autonomy and autonomicity. Instead of employing human operators to in-
dividually control the members of the swarm, a completely different model
of operations would be required, where the swarm will operate completely
autonomously or with some control at the swarm level.
This chapter will describe swarm-based systems, the possible use of swarms
in future space missions, technologies needed to implement them, and some
of the challenges in developing them. We will outline the motivation for using
swarms in future exploration missions. We will describe one concept mission
in relation to the characteristics that such a mission (and similar systems)
would need to exhibit in order to become a reality.
