The Road to On-Board Crew Autonomy: Using ISS’ Columbus Module as Basis for Ground Procedure Automation

Abstract

Future human exploration missions require new concepts of operations since the international roadmap foresees stations with uncrewed periods (e.g. Lunar Gateway) and deep space missions with communi cation delays making real-time monitoring and control impossible (e.g. any station on its way to or in orbit of Mars). As part of the commitment to achieve human presence in Lunar orbit and prepare for missions to Mars, the goal for future operations is to become independent from ground and enable crews to live and work autonomously. However, as a first step towards on-board crew autonomy, the ground segment itself needs to be automated and its functions transferred on-board. For this purpose, this pa per introduces a novel tool, based on Columbus Operations, conducted at the Columbus Control-Center (COL-CC), allowing the interaction between scheduled activities and the commanding infrastructure, by automatically generating a command sequence, transferring the command sequence to the operators’ command interface for inspection and approval, and finally sending the commands to the receiver for execution. This tool is implemented as an on-board version, as well as an on-ground prototype.