autoNGC: A Flight Software Framework for Autonomous Navigation, Guidance, and Control

autoNGC is a mission-enabling flight software suite that provides onboard autonomous navigation, guidance, and control (NGC) for space missions. Leveraging NASA’s core Flight System (cFS) flight software framework, autoNGC is implemented as a set of reusable cFS apps and libraries that allow the system to be customized for specific sensors, hardware, and software. A variety of navigation measurement sources are currently supported, including GNSS, limb-based optical navigation, terrain-relative navigation, radiometric measurements, and accelerometer measurements. autoNGC integrates existing NASA-developed software and hardware systems, including the Goddard Enhanced Onboard Navigation System (GEONS) navigation filter, the cFS Goddard Image Analysis and Navigation Tool (cGIANT), the SpaceCube flight processing system, and the NavCube GNSS receiver. A flight computing system based on NASA’s SpaceCube onboard processing system is being developed using the SpaceCube 3mini processor card with a RISC-V soft processor and the SpaceCube mini-Z processor card with an ARM Cortex CPU. 

This presentation will detail the current flight software architecture of autoNGC. The presentation will also include the architecture of the SpaceCube-based computing platform being created for autoNGC. Finally, the autoNGC software simulation suite and the hardware-in-the-loop testbed will be presented.