Stress-Sharing: A Bio-Inspired Approach to Decentralized Fault Repair in Modular Spacecraft
This work addresses the challenge of autonomous fault repair in modular spacecraft, which is critical for long-duration missions where human intervention is infeasible.
This paper introduces a decentralized, bio-inspired stress-sharing repair policy for modular spacecraft that enables autonomous fault repair under local information and physical constraints. In simulations with up to 160 modules and up to 30% random failures, the policy consolidates roughly 80% or more of surviving modules into a single connected component, with performance improving as assembly size increases.
Structural damage in modular spacecraft can disrupt mechanical and communication connectivity, reducing system capability. Existing approaches rely on redundancy or preplanned reconfiguration and do not enable autonomous repair under local information and physical constraints. We model the spacecraft as a lattice-constrained graph and introduce a fully decentralized, asynchronous stress-sharing repair policy inspired by biological wound healing: local distress signals guide surviving modules toward damaged regions to close fragmented gaps, after which each displaced module locally retraces its own motions to recover the pre-damage shape, using only local information and no absolute position sensing. We evaluate the policy in PyBullet rigid-body simulation across structures of up to 160 modules, three fault densities (10, 20, 30%), and random and localized damage. The policy consolidates the surviving modules into a single connected body: even in the most severe case tested, where 30% of modules fail at random, it gathers roughly 80% or more of the surviving modules into one connected component, and this fraction improves with assembly size, making the approach well suited as a swarm-scale repair policy for large modular spacecraft.