On-board Automated Mission Planning for Spacecraft Autonomy: A Survey

Traditionally, space mission operations are based on preplanned activities fulfilled by the ground segment. Due to restricted visibility windows and communication delays, some space systems cannot be completely controlled from the ground in real-time. A way to overcome this issue is to equip the satellite flight software with an autonomous decision-making system such as onboard automated planning techniques. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on goal-based mission planning to increase the level of spacecraft autonomy. The most used onboard planning techniques for space missions such as temporal and hierarchical planning are presented in details. We describe several onboard planners and compare them by design choices and performance results. Research trends in goal-based planning for the space domain are also outlined. This paper highlights the automated mission planning, whose state of the art has not been deeply explored by other surveys on autonomous spacecraft.