Ant-Based Mission Planning for Constellations: A Generic Framework Applied to EO and Data Relay Missions

Abstract

The earth observation market is growing rapidly, along with themissions’ complexity. Therefore, automated mission planning systems are being designed, allowing for operators to simply specify their intentions on a high level. In this paper, we propose an automated mission planning system based on the ants’ foraging mechanism and apply it to two different mission planning problems, from an earth imaging and a data relay mission, investigating the system’s ability to be generalized. We compare the planning process for the two problems and generalize on the type of planning problems the system can address.