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This paper introduces a decentralized, bio-inspired stress-sharing repair policy for modular spacecraft that addresses structural damage by enabling autonomous repair without reliance on absolute position sensing. By modeling the spacecraft as a lattice-constrained graph, the approach utilizes local distress signals to guide surviving modules toward damaged areas, effectively closing gaps and restoring connectivity. In simulations with up to 160 modules, the method demonstrated a remarkable ability to consolidate surviving modules, achieving over 80% connectivity even with 30% random module failures, highlighting its potential for large-scale applications in modular spacecraft systems.
Surviving modules can autonomously repair a damaged spacecraft, achieving over 80% connectivity even under severe fault conditions.
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.
