Seminar: Sean A. Phillips

April 18, 2025

Distributed Satellite Autonomy - Challenges, Approaches, and Recent Results

Sean A. Phillips, Air Force Research Laboratory

3:00 pm, UNM Centennial Engineering Center, Room 1026
Online Guests: Contact Prof. Osiński <osinski@chtm.unm.edu> for a Zoom link

Abstract: Currently, satellite operations are quite a manual process, requiring a multi-shift crews to maintain operations of critical missions like GPS. However, with the push to distribute and proliferate satellite missions and the increasing congestion of the space domain, satellite operations in its current state are not scalable due to the centralized operating paradigm. Recently there has been a push to automate many of the functions of the satellite and move the operations from a human-in-the-loop to a human-on-the-loop paradigm where the operators will serve as a monitoring function. In general, satellite autonomy is a large multi-discipline research area spanning the areas of systems and control, machine learning, satellite design, human-machine teaming, data fusion, and software design and development. This presentation will discuss challenges, approaches and methods under development at AFRL to enable distributed autonomous satellite operations.

Bio: Dr. Sean A. Phillips received his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Arizona specializing in Dynamics and Controls in 2011 and 2014, respectively, followed by Ph.D in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018.. He now is a Senior Mechanical Engineer and Technology Advisor of the Space Control Branch at the Air Force Research Laboratory. He leads the Local Intelligent Network of Collaborative Systems Laboratory and a portfolio on distributed and clustered satellite autonomy, spanning fundamental to applied R&D. He also holds the title of Research Assistant Professor (LAT) at UNM. In 2023, Dr. Phillips received the AFRL Early Career Award. His research interests include autonomous satellite operations, systems and control design, robustness analysis, hybrid systems, verification and validation tools, UAV and robotics, and safe reinforcement learning