Giusy Falcone, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:
Today, the space industry is booming with exciting additions. However, the more ambitious the mission goals and the farther exploration takes us from Earth, the more ingenious, cost-effective, and safe solutions need to be engineered to enable such missions. To handle the increasing complexity, the next generation of space missions will require autonomous human-level decision-making in highly unknown or perturbed environments.

In this talk, I will present the prospects and challenges for developing autonomous and robotics systems that can dynamically evolve and modify with the environment. The talk will highlight how the system-level impact of autonomy integration and its combination with optimal control allows for an intelligent, dynamic, autonomous system capable of making rational decisions that consider both the safety and performance of the specific executed operations and the overall performance of the mission.

This approach is used to advance aerobraking, an atmospheric process used to slow down and insert a spacecraft into a low orbit around a planet, showing dramatic advancement in flight performance, risk, and cost. Finally, a generalization of the findings is presented in terms of necessary improvements for designing environment-aware decision-making algorithms, and the opportunities autonomy will provide for the next generation of space missions.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Giusy Falcone is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. She works on trajectory optimization for space applications in the RExLab group under the guidance of Prof. Zachary Manchester. In May 2022, she earned a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Prof. Zachary Putnam. Her expertise lies in hypersonic and space systems; space guidance, navigation, and control; flight mechanics; mission design; trajectory optimization; artificial intelligence; and autonomous systems. Her research explores innovative techniques to enable low-cost, autonomous space missions capable of reasoning and reacting safely in a changing environment. She is the recipient of the 2022 AIAA Intelligent Systems Best Paper Award for her work in Autonomous Aerobraking Maneuver Planning using Deep Reinforcement Learning. She is also one of the selected participants of the 2022 Rising Stars in Aerospace (RSIA) Symposium and the Keck Institute for Space Studies Workshop “Revolutionizing Access to the Martian Surface.” In addition, Dr. Falcone is one of the recipients of several fellowships, including the Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship, the Graduate Student Service Award, the Robert Beatty Fellowship, and the Aerospace Engineering Alumni Advisory Board Fellowship.