Multiple agent-based autonomy for satellite constellations Original Research Article

Multiple, highly autonomous, satellite systems are envisioned in the near future because they are capable of higher performance, lower cost, better fault tolerance, reconfigurability and upgradability. This paper presents an architecture and multi-agent design and simulation environment that will enable agent-based multi-satellite systems to fulfill their complex mission objectives, termed ObjectAgentTM. Its application is shown for a distributed aperture radar mission, although its applicability spans many types of missions. Required spacecraft functions, software agents, and multi-agent organisations are described for the radar mission, as well as their implementation. Agent-based simulations of mission case studies show the autonomous operation of the multi-agent architecture, which can then be used to build, evaluate and compare autonomous software architectures for multiple satellite systems.