Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and on the development of appropriate support tools. NASA is pursuing fur-
ther development of formal methods techniques and tools that can be applied
in the development of swarm-based systems to help achieve confidence in their
correctness.
10.6 Future Swarm Concepts
A brief overview of swarm technologies was presented with emphasis on
their relevance for potential future NASA missions. Swarm technologies hold
promise for complex exploration and scientific observational missions that re-
quire capabilities that would be unavailable in missions designed around single
spacecraft.
While swarm autonomy is clearly essential for missions where human con-
trol is not feasible (e.g., when communications delays are too great or commun-
ications data rates are inadequate for effective remote control), autonomicity
is essential for survival of individual spacecraft as well as the entire swarm as
a consequence of hostile space environments.
Although ANTS was a concept mission, the underlying techniques and
technologies that were developed are also motivating other technologies and
applications. ANTS technology has many potential applications in military
and commercial environments, as well as in other space missions. In military
surveillance, smaller craft, perhaps carrying only a basic camera or other
instrument, could coordinate to provide 3D views of a target. The US Navy
has been studying the use of vehicle swarms for several years. In mining and
underwater exploration, autonomous craft could go into areas that are too
dangerous or small for humans. For navigation, ANTS technology could make
GPS cheaper and more accurate because using many smaller satellites for
triangulation would make positioning more accurate.
Finally, in other types of space exploration, a swarm flying over a planetary
surface could yield significant information in a short time. The ANTS tech-
nology could also benefit commercial satellite operations, making them both
cheaper and more reliable. With its autonomic properties, a swarm could
easily replace an individual pico-satellite, preserving operations that are now
often lost when satellites become damaged. Mission control could also increase
functionality simply by having the swarm add members (perhaps from a col-
lection of pico-satellites already in orbit as standby spares) with the needed
functionality, rather than launching a new, large, complex satellite.
The obvious need for advances in miniaturization and nanotechnology
is prompting groundbreaking advances at NASA and elsewhere. The need
for more ecient on-board power generation and storage motivates research
in solar energy and battery technology, and the need for energy-ecient
propulsion motivates research on solar sails and other technologies such as
electric-field propulsion. The ANTS concepts also push the envelope in terms
of software technologies for requirements engineering, nontrivial learning,
