Techniques of Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications - A Survey

Abstract

The possibilities to observe and interact with any given spacecraft are naturally limited compared to groundbased systems due to a number of factors. These include but are not limited to the availability and bandwidth of their connection to ground, the availability of staff, communication latencies and power budgets. While a minimum level of autonomy is required for every spacecraft, past experiments and missions have shown that introducing more sophisticated autonomy mechanisms can drastically increase the efficiency for many missions in terms of reliability, science output and required operational effort. Artificial intelligence poses an increasingly popular approach for implementing on-board autonomy. The number of techniques and variants of artificial intelligence available in the literature is, however, just as diversified as their potential field of application. To provide an overview of the current state of the art of artificial intelligence and its application for space systems, this paper provides an extensive survey on existing techniques and algorithms as well as existing and potential applications on board spacecraft and on ground. The survey focuses on autonomous planning and scheduling of operations, self-awareness, anomaly detection and Fault Detection Isolation and Recovery (FDIR), on-board data analysis as well as onboard operations and processing of earth-observation data.