Space Debris Removal using Nano-Satellites controlled by Low-Power Autonomous Agents

Abstract: Space debris is an ever-increasing problem in space travel. There are already many old, no longer functional spacecraft and debris orbiting the earth, which endanger both the safe operation of satellites and space travel. Small nano-satellite swarms can address this problem by autonomously de-orbiting debris safely into the Earth's atmosphere. This work builds on the recent advances of autonomous agents deployed in resource-constrained platforms and shows a first simplified approach how such intelligent and autonomous nano-satellite swarms can be realized. We implement our autonomous agent software on wireless microcontrollers and perform experiments on a specialized test-bed to show the feasibility and overall energy efficiency of our approach.