Aerospace mission autonomy can improve mission capabilities, reduce the burden on ground operators, and prevent mission failure when encountering unexpected situations. However, autonomy comes at the cost of additional complexity for design, development, and testing. This research presents an autonomous mission framework to bridge the gap between existing aerospace mission systems and emerging autonomous paradigms. Traditional aerospace missions without custom autonomy solutions generally follow rigid schedules, and tasks are executed during specified time windows. For these types of scenarios, the only task constraint is the current time. Our proposed framework, called the Schedule Manager, expands on this concept by adding additional constraint checks such as conflict, priority, and resource constraints. Through the design and upload of task schedules, constraint tables, and contingency schedules, the benefits of autonomy can be achieved without deviating significantly from the standard, thereby simplifying the adoption, integration, and safety analysis process. This framework was integrated and tested with NASA’s core Flight System and 42 spacecraft simulator, and run on development boards comparable to flight hardware.

航天任务自主性可以提高任务能力，减轻地面操作人员的负担，并在遇到突发情况时防止任务失败。然而，自主性是以增加设计、开发和测试复杂性为代价的。这项研究提出了一个自主任务框架，以弥合现有航空航天任务系统和新兴自主范式之间的差距。没有定制自主解决方案的传统航空航天任务通常遵循严格的时间表，并在指定的时间窗口内执行任务。对于这些类型的场景，唯一的任务约束是当前时间。我们提议的框架称为调度管理器，通过添加额外的约束检查（例如冲突、优先级和资源约束）扩展了这一概念。通过设计和上传任务计划、约束表和应急计划，可以在不显着偏离标准的情况下实现自治的好处，从而简化采用、集成和安全分析过程。该框架与 NASA 的核心飞行系统和 42 个航天器模拟器集成和测试，并在与飞行硬件相当的开发板上运行。