AI for GNC with Airbus/ESA – Extension

PI: Abate, Alessandro

Department: Computer Science (BL)

This project is intended to be a 3-month extension of the ongoing IAA, up to 30 June 2022. The ongoing IAA project targets the application of current research on Formal Verification and Control of safety-critical systems to the area of Safety-Critical Autonomy in Space, where we have been focussing on attitude control problems, applied on a space rocket and on a satellite (OPS-SAT). My partners (Airbus (UK) and ESA ESOC (DE), respectively) have asked me to focus the Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) problems to the study of attitude pointing control (a core GNC problem) for a space rocket and for OPS-SAT. This goal has been motivated by the wide availability of telemetry data from both systems, which in the case of OPS-SAT can be also generated actively, namely by directly controlling the satellite. The role of data is core to the technique (LCRL, discussed shortly) that I am transferring from my research to the two attitude control problems. According to the original plans, I am pursuing the first application with Airbus UK (Stevenage), and the latter with ESA ESOC (Darmstadt, DE). The extensions to the ongoing IAA, which have been discussed with the partners, represent interesting opportunities, and would not be feasibly attainable within the current project.