Research Statement
My research seeks to establish a foundation for trusted mission-level autonomy in space systems. Future spacecraft will increasingly operate in uncertain, resource-constrained, and communication-limited environments in which fixed preplanned operations are no longer sufficient. Instead, missions will need to adapt: spacecraft and constellations must perceive their environment, make onboard decisions, and modify their behavior in response to changing conditions, all while remaining aligned with human intent.
This shift creates a fundamental scientific and engineering challenge. As autonomy becomes more capable, the central question is no longer only how to optimize a trajectory, schedule, or controller in isolation. Rather, it is how to define what a mission is capable of doing when decisions are made onboard, under uncertainty, by distributed systems whose behavior evolves over time. At the same time, autonomous adaptation is only useful if it is interpretable and trustworthy. If operators cannot understand why a spacecraft acted, cannot verify that it remains aligned with mission goals, or cannot assess the consequences of that adaptation, then autonomy becomes operationally fragile rather than enabling. A parallel challenge lies in resource limitation: many space systems remain strongly constrained by onboard actuation even though environmental dynamics and weak perturbations can often be exploited as meaningful sources of control authority.
My work addresses these challenges by integrating three research directions into a unified program. First, I study capability-centered mission design, developing ways to represent mission performance through measurable system-level behaviors such as resilience, responsiveness, coordination, coverage, and resource efficiency. Second, I develop trusted and interpretable autonomy, with a focus on onboard decision-making under uncertainty that remains legible to human operators and consistent with mission intent. Third, I investigate physics-aware control, leveraging environmental dynamics and small perturbative forces not merely as disturbances to reject, but as resources for adaptive mission execution.
A key enabler of this vision is high-fidelity computational experimentation. Through SpaceAGORA, a simulation environment developed in my lab, I evaluate how adaptive behaviors emerge in constellations, planetary missions, rendezvous scenarios, and resource-constrained systems. My long-term goal is to enable space missions that are not only autonomous, but trusted: systems that can adapt intelligently, use their environment effectively, and remain understandable to the humans who design, supervise, and depend on them.