{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/autonomy-in-the-real-world-autonomous","title":"Autonomy in the Real-World: Autonomous Trajectory Planning for Asteroid Reconnaissance via Stochastic Optimization","arxiv_id":"2412.06816","date":"2024-12-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kazuya Echigo","Abhishek Cauligi","Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay","Dan Scharf","Gregory Lantoine","Behçet Açıkmeşe","Issa Nesnas"],"abstract":"This paper presents the development and evaluation of an optimization-based autonomous trajectory planning algorithm for the asteroid reconnaissance phase of a deep-space exploration mission. The reconnaissance phase is a low-altitude flyby to collect detailed information around a potential landing site. Although such autonomous deep-space exploration missions have garnered considerable interest recently, state-of-the-practice in trajectory design involves a time-intensive ground-based open-loop process that forward propagates multiple trajectories with a range of initial conditions and parameters to account for uncertainties in spacecraft knowledge and actuation. In this work, we introduce a stochastic trajectory optimization-based approach to generate trajectories that satisfy both the mission and spacecraft safety constraints during the reconnaissance phase of the Deep-space Autonomous Robotic Explorer (DARE) mission concept, which seeks to travel to and explore a near-Earth object autonomously, with minimal ground intervention. We first use the Multi-Spacecraft Concept and Autonomy Tool (MuSCAT) simulation framework to rigorously validate the underlying modeling assumptions for our trajectory planner and then propose a method to transform this stochastic optimal control problem into a deterministic one tailored for use with an off-the-shelf nonlinear solver. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithmic approach through extensive numerical experiments and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-practice benchmark used for representative missions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06816v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06816v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"autonomy-in-the-real-world-autonomous","repo_url":"https://github.com/nasa/muscat","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}