Efficient space exploration through laziness

Autonomous behavior and onboard decision making is the backbone of robotic space exploration. The enormous distance and communication latency make such missions hardly controllable from Earth and external decision making may overlap and often contradict with the onboard decision making. We propose a behavior model based on some sort of “laziness” that helps spacecraft evaluate external instructions and eventually postpone their execution, or even discard some, when those are considered inappropriate by the internal spacecraft decision making.