Purpose of Review: The article provides an extensive overview on the resilient autonomy advances made across various missions, orbital or deep-space, that captures the current research approaches while investigating the possible future direction of resiliency in space autonomy.Recent Findings: In recent years, the need for several automated operations in space applications has been rising, that ranges from the following: spacecraft proximity operations, navigation and some station keeping applications, entry, decent and landing, planetary surface exploration, etc. Also, with the rise of miniaturization concepts in spacecraft, advanced missions with multiple spacecraft platforms introduce more complex behaviours and interactions within the agents, which drives the need for higher levels of autonomy and accommodating collaborative behaviour coupled with robustness to counter unforeseen uncertainties. This collective behaviour is now referred to as resiliency in autonomy. As space missions are getting more and more complex, for example applications where a platform physically interacts with non-cooperative space objects (debris) or planetary bodies coupled with hostile, unpredictable, and extreme environments, there is a rising need for resilient autonomy solutions.Summary: Resilience with its key attributes of robustness, redundancy and resourcefulness will lead toward new and enhanced mission paradigms of space missions.

In this letter, a floating robotic emulation platform is presented with an autonomous maneuverability for a virtual demonstration of a satellite motion. Such a robotic platform design is characterized by its friction-less, levitating, yet planar motion over a hyper-smooth surface. The design of the robotic platform, integrated with the sensor and actuator units, is briefly described, including the related component specification along with the mathematical model, describing its dynamic motion. Additionally, the article establishes a nonlinear optimal control architecture consisting of a unified model predictive approach for the overall manoeuvre tracking. The efficacy of the proposed modeling and control scheme is demonstrated in multiple experimental studies, where it is depicted that the proposed controller has the potential to address a precise point-to-point manoeuvre with terminal objectives, as well as an excellent path following capability. The proposed design is validated with extensive experimental studies, and it is supported with related results.

This article proposes a novel decentralized two-layered and multi-sensorial based fusion architecture for establishing a novel resilient pose estimation scheme. As it will be presented, the first layer of the fusion architecture considers a set of distributed nodes. All the possible combinations of pose information, appearing from different sensors, are integrated to acquire various possibilities of estimated pose obtained by involving multiple extended Kalman filters. Based on the estimated poses, obtained from the first layer, a Fault Resilient Optimal Information Fusion (FR-OIF) paradigm is introduced in the second layer to provide a trusted pose estimation. The second layer incorporates the output of each node (constructed in the first layer) in a weighted linear combination form, while explicitly accounting for the maximum likelihood fusion criterion. Moreover, in the case of inaccurate measurements, the proposed FR-OIF formulation enables a self resiliency by embedding a built-in fault isolation mechanism. Additionally, the FR-OIF scheme is also able to address accurate localization in the presence of sensor failures or erroneous measurements. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fusion architecture, extensive experimental studies have been conducted with a micro aerial vehicle, equipped with various onboard pose sensors, such as a 3D lidar, a real-sense camera, an ultra wide band node, and an IMU. The efficiency of the proposed novel framework is extensively evaluated through multiple experimental results, while its superiority is also demonstrated through a comparison with the classical multi-sensorial centralized fusion approach.

Several essential services, such as cellular phones, the Internet, television, navigation, weather prediction, and remote sensing, rely on satellites in low-Earth orbits, the technology for which is fairly mature by now. With the advent of the 21st century, space exploration has evolved to accomplish various complex and challenging missions, both within and beyond low-Earth orbits. Next-generation space missions will focus on more complex orbital operations, which include active debris removal; on-orbit servicing through rendezvous and docking; cooperative missions with multiple satellites, such as constellation and cluster formations; and so on. In addition, traversing uncharted territories, such as halo orbits around Lagrange points, probing multiple asteroids and comets across the solar system and beyond, and autonomous landing on planetary bodies, have become part of challenging missions that are increasingly common. Several space organizations of various countries (including capable private players) are showing great interest in such missions for a variety of reasons, such as basic curiosity to explore the universe and its origin and harnessing minerals and energy from other planetary bodies.