Bionic autonomic nervous system and self-healing for NASA ANTS-like missions

The PAM (Prospecting Asteroid Mission) submission of the NASA concept mission ANTS (Autonomous Nano-Technology Swarm) involves the launch of a swarm of 1,000 autonomous pico-class spacecraft that will explore the asteroid belt. I this paper, we describe the development of a novel BANS (Bionic Autonomic Nervous System) technology with the potential to be deployed as part of the ANTS mission. The BANS is analogous to the biological nervous system, which consists of basic modules such as cyber axons, cyber neurons, the cyber peripheral nervous system and the cyber central nervous system. Equipped with the BANS, the ANTS system would be able to self-diagnose and self-heal faults/failures and avoid possible damage or collisions. An implementation and experimental results of the BANS exhibits the effectiveness and efficiency of the self-healing functions.

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