System engineering of autonomous space vehicles

Human exploration of the solar system requires fully autonomous systems when travelling more than 5 light minutes from Earth. This autonomy is necessary to manage a large, complex spacecraft with limited crew members and skills available. The communication latency requires the vehicle to deal with events with only limited crew interaction in most cases. The engineering of these systems requires an extensive knowledge of the spacecraft systems, information theory, and autonomous algorithm characteristics. The characteristics of the spacecraft systems must be matched with the autonomous algorithm characteristics to reliably monitor and control the system. This presents a large system engineering problem. Recent work on product-focused, elegant system engineering will be applied to this application, looking at the full autonomy stack, the matching of autonomous systems to spacecraft systems, and the integration of different types of algorithms. Each of these areas will be outlined and a general approach defined for system engineering to provide the optimal solution to the given application context.