USE OF SWARM INTELLIGENCE IN SPACECRAFT CONSTELLATIONS FOR THE RESOURCE EXPLORATION OF THE ASTEROID BELT
S. A. Curtis, Michael Lee Rilee, Pamela Elizabeth Clark, G. Marr · 2003
We describe the Prospecting ANTS Mission (PAM) whose object is to explore the resource potential the Solar System's Asteroid Belt. The mission is consistent with the present NASA strategic plan for the HEDS (Human Exploration and Development of Space) enterprise. In this plan, the automated discovery of space resources is envisioned as a building block for expanding the human presence in space. The Asteroid Belt consists of thousands of widely separated bodies. Targeting thousands of individual asteroids, which will require hovering in a highly irregular gravity field, demands a very large autonomous constellation of specialized workers. The ANTS (Autonomous Nano-Technology Swarm) concept has a number of possible applications of which the PAM mission is one. ANTS, based on a hierarchical insect social order, use an evolvable, self-similar, hierarchical neural system in which individual spacecraft represent the highest-level nodes. ANTS uses swarm intelligence attained through collective, cooperative interactions of the nodes at all levels of the system. At the highest levels this can take the form of cooperative, collective behavior among the individual spacecraft in a very large constellation. The ANTS neural architecture is designed for totally autonomous operation of