Research On Autonomous Mission Planning Of Earth Observation Satellite

As the increasing of the earth observation satellite(EOS) amount, the pressure on the satellite ground control center is becoming heavier. Thus satellite autonomous operation has become an inevitable trend. EOS autonomous mission planning is the core of satellite autonomous operation, which refers to the satellite using some planning algorithm to produce detail command sequence after receiving high-level instructions that describe a task from ground, according to the current state of the satellite, the action set involved in satellite missions. This paper focuses on the autonomous mission planning of single EOS, the main work and contributions are as follows:1) Analyzing the characteristics and constraints of EOS mission. As a conclusion, the Earth observation mission, including target observation, data-download and orbit maneuver, is related with five constraints, which are satellite payload, satellite platform, fuel, data-download and temporal.2) Building the integrated model of satellite mission. At first, we present the mathematical description of EOS mission, analyze the EOS mission properties in planning; then the integrated model is established with planning domain definition language(PDDL), under the consideration of the former five constraints mentioned in 1).3) Presenting the algorithm to solve the EOS mission planning. A temporal plan is obtained by a two phase planning algorithm including heuristic search algorithm in the first phase, and improved program evaluation and review technique(PERT) in the second phase.4) Designing and implementing the EOS autonomous mission planning simulation-system. This system, realized with Qt in Linux, is an integration of task model and algorithm. Two simulation cases are designed to verify the reasonableness of the integrated model, the feasibility and accuracy of the two phase algorithm.This subject introduces a new method for the EOS mission planning, the research results could provide technical references for further research on satellite or satellite cluster autonomous operation.