Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications

The ambitious short-term and long-term goals set down by the various national space agencies call for radical advances in several of the main space engineering areas, the design of intelligent space agents certainly being one of them. In recent years, this has led to an increasing interest in artificial intelligence by the entire aerospace community. However, in the current state of the art, several open issues and showstoppers can be identified. In this chapter, we review applications of artificial intelligence in the field of space engineering and space technology and identify open research questions and challenges. In particular, the following topics are identified and discussed: distributed artificial intelligence, enhanced situation self-awareness, and decision support for spacecraft system design.