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.

翻译：空间碎片是太空旅行中日益严重的问题。目前已有大量老旧失效的航天器及碎片环绕地球运行，这对卫星安全运行和太空旅行均构成威胁。微型纳米卫星集群可通过自主引导碎片安全坠入地球大气层的方式解决此问题。本研究基于近期在资源受限平台上部署自主智能体的技术进展，首次提出实现此类智能自主纳米卫星集群的简化方案。我们将自主智能体软件部署于无线微控制器，并在专用测试平台上进行实验，验证了该方案的可行性与整体能效性。