Data Abstraction Architecture for Spacecraft Autonomy

Abstract

Spacecrafts generate huge amounts of data. A significant challenge for autonomous control systems and human operators is ensuring that the right data (and combinations of data) are available at the right time for control and decision-making and ensuring that the data is at the right abstraction level. In this paper, we describe a data abstraction architecture that provides a canonical way to assemble and interact with data abstractions. We have developed an open, flexible toolkit that allows end users to build data abstraction networks. Two use cases were successfully tested against a Lunar habitat simulation, demonstrating that high level state information can be generated by the data abstraction architecture and used by a high level controller. Our approach improves the process of both control and monitoring of space systems by separating controls and displays from data abstraction.

A distributed event architecture for space system comps

“…The Sensor Event Abstraction Language (SEAL) is an XML grammar that defines data manipulation and message handling operators, enabling the description of sophisticated transformations on event-based telemetry data [4]. The SEAL syntax and semantics are intended to support the computational requirements of NASA telemetry and telemetry management processes and align to the conceptual model of those processes held by expert NASA flight control engineers.…”

“…The Data Abstraction Reasoning Engine or DARE, is a distributed, message based software program that takes as input a SEAL file, instantiates the listed comps, connects the comps to each other, the sources, and the sinks [4]. When DARE is finished initializing, data sources are producing events from live data, comps are running on those generated events, and sinks are consuming the resultant events.…”