Online tree-based planning for active spacecraft fault estimation and collision avoidance

Autonomous robots operating in uncertain or hazardous environments subject to state safety constraints must be able to identify and isolate faulty components in a time-optimal manner. When the underlying fault is ambiguous and intertwined with the robot’s state estimation, motion plans that discriminate between simultaneous actuator and sensor faults are necessary. However, the coupled fault mode and physical state uncertainty creates a constrained optimization problem that is challenging to solve with existing methods. We combined belief-space tree search, marginalized filtering, and concentration inequalities in our method, safe fault estimation via active sensing tree search (s-FEAST), a planner that actively diagnoses system faults by selecting actions that give the most informative observations while simultaneously enforcing probabilistic state constraints. We justify this approach with theoretical analysis showing s-FEAST’s convergence to optimal policies. Using our robotic spacecraft simulator, we experimentally validated s-FEAST by safely and successfully performing fault estimation while on a collision course with a model comet. These results were further validated through extensive numerical simulations demonstrating s-FEAST’s performance.