A Fault Management Strategy for Autonomous Rendezvous and Capture with the ISS

The Orbital Cygnus vehicle is being developed to perform autonomous rendezvous with International Space Station (ISS) and to provide cargo services to the faculty. Safety through fault management has been a primary consideration in the design of the trajectories, GN&C algorithms, and software. This paper describes the approach used to design and validate a fault management system required to meet the ISS visiting vehicle safety requirements. The nominal mission trajectory and abort maneuvers were designed using linear covariance analysis and were validated to provide a combination of passive and active collision avoidance and requirement satisfaction through semi-analytical methods and extensive simulation. Hardware faults, such as IMU, LIDAR, and GPS sensor faults, are managed using a highly reliable backup propagation system and Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) algorithms. These algorithms ensure that key sensor systems are fault tolerant and that faulty measurement sources are detected and identified before they significantly corrupt the navigation system. Critically, the FDI system ensures that sufficient measurements will be available to execute an abort maneuver safely at any time. The IMU, LIDAR and GPS FDI algorithms employ standard parity methods to detect sensor measurement errors and a Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach for fault identification when sufficient measurement redundancy exists. In the case of GPS FDI, parity space algorithms are utilized for GPS receiver redundancy as well as measurement redundancy within a particular GPS receiver. This allows independent detection and identification of receiver faults and measurement faults arising from GPS satellite faults or a degraded multipath environment. Fault thresholds for FDI were validated using Monte Carlo analysis in a high fidelity 6DOF simulation.