The road to on-board crew autonomy: Using ISS' Columbus module as the basis for ground procedure automation.

Future human exploration missions require new concepts of operations since the international roadmap foresees stations with uncrewed periods (e.g. Lunar Gateway) and deep space missions with communication delays making real-time monitoring and control impossible (e.g. any vehicle on its way to or in orbit of Mars). As part of the commitment to achieve human presence in lunar orbit and prepare for missions to Mars, the goal for future operations is to become independent from ground and enable crews to live and work autonomously. However, as a first step towards on-board crew autonomy, the ground segment itself needs to be automated and its functions eventually transferred on-board. For this purpose, this paper introduces a novel tool, based on Columbus operations, conducted at the Columbus Control Center (COL-CC), allowing the interaction between scheduled activities and the commanding infrastructure, by automatically generating a command sequence, transferring the command sequence to the operators' command interface for inspection and approval, and finally sending the commands to the receiver for execution. This tool is implemented as a ground prototype, in order to show how ground operations can be automated and how such a tool can ultimately lead to increased crew autonomy. • Crewed deep-space missions cannot use real-time commanding, due to signal delays. • Real-time commanding is shifted from the ground controller to an on-board system. • An interface allows interaction between crew, mission timeline and command system. • The system is capable of automatically generating commands, based on constraints. • An activity database stores all necessary information for activity execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]