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Towards Higher Levels of Autonomy and Robustness in Space Operations through Uncertainty Management and Quantification

Project description

Reducing uncertainty and increasing robustness in space exploration autonomy

Our ability to explore our cosmos increases exponentially with advanced technologies for autonomous missions. Unmanned spacecraft must travel great distances under extremely harsh conditions in largely uncharted regions. The robustness of their instrumentation for guidance, navigation and control directly impacts not only successful data retrieval but also the value of the data retrieved. Asteroids are remnants of planet formation and can tell us about the origins of our solar system. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the THOR project will enhance autonomous space operations focused on asteroid exploration via the integration of two quantifiable sources of uncertainty into space operation management and planning.

Objective

The overarching goal of the THOR research project is to augment space operations autonomy and robustness through uncertainty management and quantification. This involves a bottom up process where novel uncertainty estimation and propagation techniques will be employed to be subsequently embedded within a stochastic robust controller. The main outcome will be a robust non-linear non-gaussian integrated guidance, navigation and control strategy with both model-based and exogenous disturbance estimation. Since both uncertainty sources are quantified, a more reliable and efficient space operation management and planning will be obtained. The THOR scenario relates to asteroid exploration which is one of the most challenging and uncertain space operations nowadays. This is due to the limited asteroid data known prior to the arrival if the body is visited for the first time. Two mission phases can be clearly distinguished: on-orbit data collection where most of the uncertainty will be removed by estimation; then, an entry descent and landing critical phase where the stochastic robust controller will use the previous uncertainty knowledge, is envisioned. The THOR project methodology and results are expected to advance current state-of-the-art in autonomous spacecraft guidance, navigation and control, thus enabling more advanced space exploration mission concepts with a higher scientific return, without loss of generality.

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2020

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Coordinator

UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 204 415,68
Address
CALLE S. FERNANDO 4
41004 Sevilla
Spain

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Region
Sur Andalucía Sevilla
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 204 415,68

Partners (1)

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