Fault Management Technologies for Autonomous Systems

NASA SMD seeks to answer many long-standing questions about our planet, Sun, solar system, and beyond as well as enable space exploration. NASA's science program has well over 100 spacecraft in operation, formulation, or development, generating science data accessible to researchers everywhere. As science missions have increasingly complex goals often on compressed timetables and have more pressure to reduce operation costs, system autonomy must increase in response. Fault management is a critical enabling factor in autonomous systems to determine proper corrective actions after an unplanned event, large disturbance, or fault. Fault management (FM) is a key component of system autonomy, serving to detect, interpret, and mitigate failures that threaten mission success. Robust FM must address the full range of hardware failures and also must consider failure of sensors or the flow of sensor data, harmful or unexpected system interaction with the environment, and problems due to faults in software or incorrect control inputs including failure of autonomy components themselves. Challenges related to linear, nonlinear, discrete, or continuous systems must be considered in the design of the approach. For example, critical subsystems such as the electric power system (EPS) and attitude control systems (ACS) require advanced FM techniques to achieve extremely high levels of mission reliability. Furthermore, interactions between subsystems should also be investigated, as the effect of faults may propagate from one critical system to another. This subtopic addresses particular interest in onboard FM capabilities, namely, onboard sensing approaches, computing, algorithms, and models to assess and maintain spacecraft health. The higher goal is to provide a system capability for management of future spacecraft. Offboard components such as modeling techniques and tools, development environments, and verification and validation (V&V) technologies are also relevant, provided they contribute to novel or capable onboard FM.