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At least 253 records · Page 14
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Exploring Multimodal Interactions in Human-Autonomy Teaming Using a Natural User Interface

The creation of a multimodal, natural user interface to facilitate multi-agent interaction is essential to establishing trust among human and machine teammates in multi-agent systems. Trust is being researched, along with trustworthiness, as a path to certification of autonomous systems by the Autonomy Teaming and TRAjectories for Complex Trusted Operational Reliability (ATTRACTOR) project at NASA. The Autonomous Mission Experimental Logistics Interactive Assistant (AMELIA) is a natural user interface that enables multimodal interaction and is designed for rapid mission planning. AMELIA is an intelligent system that considers the user’s preferred communication strategies, as well as the time-critical aspect of the multi-agent system decision-making process. Twenty-four participants planned a multi-agent search and rescue mission, with the aid of an intelligent assistant. The results show that while the combined use of touch and speech was faster than speech alone, the single modality, touch, was still the most efficient. Future research should investigate additional input technologies.

Lisa R Le Vie↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Exploring Multimodal Interactions in Human-Autonomy Teaming Using a Natural User Interface

The creation of a multimodal, natural user interface to facilitate multi-agent interaction is essential to establishing trust among human and machine teammates in multi-agent systems. Trust is being researched, along with trustworthiness, as a path to certification of autonomous systems by the Autonomy Teaming and TRAjectories for Complex Trusted Operational Reliability (ATTRACTOR) project at NASA. The Autonomous Mission Experimental Logistics Interactive Assistant (AMELIA) is a natural user interface that enables multimodal interaction and is designed for rapid mission planning. AMELIA is an intelligent system that considers the user’s preferred communication strategies, as well as the time-critical aspect of the multi-agent system decision-making process. Twenty-four participants planned a multi-agent search and rescue mission, with the aid of an intelligent assistant. The results show that while the combined use of touch and speech was faster than speech alone, the single modality, touch, was still the most efficient. Future research should investigate additional input technologies.

Lisa Renee Le Vie↗
NASA NTRS2021

Secure and Safe Assured Autonomy (S2A2)

Aviation’s future will likely see the integration of a wide variety of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) systems including Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) for cargo/delivery, personal air vehicles, and commercial Urban Air Mobility (UAM)vehicles. However, substantial challenges exist that could delay (and possibly prevent) these developments and thus research is needed in a variety of areas to leverage technologies in autonomy, Air Traffic Management (ATM), multi-redundant flight systems architectures, and advanced wireless connectivity like 5G to meet these challenges. The goal of this ULI project is to develop new technologies and innovative operational concepts which will ensure safe, secure and robust integration of autonomous vehicles into Advanced Air Mobility-tailored transportation infrastructure. All this must be done while maintaining inter-operability with current civil air transportation systems and associated safety standards. The project is organized into four Technical Challenges (TCs) areas designed to provide unique UAM solutions and a transition roadmap for industry and government to utilize research product output.

Koushik Datta↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Recommendations to Advance Space Trusted Autonomy

While the various space agencies of the U.S. federal government have distinctly different visions for future operational space systems, all share important foundational commonalities: improve mission performance, reduce mission costs, incorporate technology advances more rapidly, increase reliability and resiliency, reduce risk, and adapt to anomalies and environmental hazards. These common needs, combined with the maturation of autonomous technology and the prospect of leveraging autonomous systems to address these needs, have led each agency to consider how and when to implement increasing levels of autonomy in their space systems. Simultaneously, the related question of how to determine the trustworthiness of an autonomous system is also escalating in significance.

Christopher A Jones↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Intelligent Control & Autonomy Branch Research Overview Research

The purpose of the subject presentation is to expose engineering students at Ohio University to ongoing work being performed by the Intelligent Control and Autonomy Branch (ICAB) at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The presentation will start with some introductory material about the organization. This will be followed by an overview of Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP) controls research and the ICAB’s support for the Space Launch System (SLS). One aspect of EAP is the integration of electrical motor/generators and other power systems components with turbine engine technology to create propulsion & power systems for single-aisle aircraft that are more fuel efficient and have lower emissions. The presentation will introduce some of the controls, systems health management, and modeling technologies developed by the ICAB to help realize EAP. NASA’s SLS is a super-heavy-lift launch vehicle that provides the foundation for human exploration beyond Earth’s orbit. The presentation will introduce capabilities developed by the ICAB to support the SLS Mission and Fault Management function which includes capabilities for abort, caution and warning, redundancy management, and safing. The presentation will conclude with information about internships with the NASA and the ICAB.

propulsion↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

The Path to Crew Autonomy - Situational Awareness in Scheduling and Rescheduling Tasks for Novice Schedulers

To increase crew autonomy for long duration exploration-class missions (LDEM), certain mission support tasks need to be completed by crew. Currently, crew activities are scheduled over the course of several weeks by ground-based experts with years of experience-based training. These experts display extensive amounts of situational awareness (SA) throughout task execution by maintaining a mental model of additional factors during scheduling such as constraints (e.g. physical space/layout), abilities and skills of the crew, and crew preferences allowing them to anticipate and mitigate potential issues. Thus, situational awareness is a key component for crews to manage their own schedules. In this paper, we examined situational awareness in novice schedulers in both a scheduling and rescheduling task. Our findings indicate that there is no significant difference between scheduling and rescheduling tasks for the development of SA in novice schedulers. Additionally, our experiment shows that novice schedulers are less able to develop sufficient SA for constraints that are dependent on one or more activities. Thus, we propose that software aids may be useful to support novice schedulers and increase SA in scheduling/rescheduling tasks. This work is vital to ensure the successful transfer of mission support tasks to the crew for future LDEM.

situation awareness↗
NASA NTRS2020

Partially Observable Games for Secure Autonomy

Technology development efforts in autonomy and cyber-defense have been evolving independently of each other, over the past decade. In this paper, we report our ongoing effort to integrate these two presently distinct areas into a single framework. To this end, we propose the two-player partially observable stochastic game formalism to capture both high-level autonomous mission planning under uncertainty and adversarial decision making subject to imperfect information. We show that synthesizing sub-optimal strategies for such games is possible under finite-memory assumptions for both the autonomous decision maker and the cyber-adversary. We then describe an experimental testbed to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed framework.

Ames, Aaron D.↗
NASA NTRS2021

FRESCO: A Framework for Spacecraft Systems Autonomy

Achieving the science exploration and defense goals of the following decades will require flight systems capable of operations with limited operator contact, system mode changes and retasking based on sensor data, and complex robotic operations. To support these capabilities, increasingly autonomous flight systems are required that can perform dedicated mission functions, e.g. payload targeting and communications, and system-level functions, e.g. planning and goal monitoring. Architecting an autonomous system requires a well-reasoned, self-consistent framework to avoid \textit{ad hoc} design choices that will introduce complexity and risk. The Framework for Robust Execution and Scheduling of Commands On-Board, FRESCO, is the result of lessons learned in developing a software architecture to enable autonomous solar system exploration. FRESCO generalizes this work to offer a modular, software-agnostic approach to developing verifiable architecture for autonomous space systems. FRESCO specifies guiding principles, functions, interfaces, and interactions from which mission-specific autonomous control architectures can be derived. FRESCO is a principled framework relying on explicit, state-based goal definitions, centralized management of state knowledge, clearly separated control boundaries, and hierarchical reasoning. Using components from FRESCO reference architecture, an autonomous decision-making architecture can be designed for spacecraft which can then be mapped to flight software architecture. FRESCO is flexibly defined to enable autonomous control of flight systems built using extensive software and hardware heritage. Finally, FRESCO-derived architectures support a spectrum of operator/spacecraft interactions, ranging from traditional commanding to goal-driven commanding with the ability to change mission goals autonomously. FRESCO has been used in defining the autonomy architectures for the ASTERIA mission and have been demonstrated in laboratory and software simulation for small body rendezvous and in-space servicing missions.

Kolcio, Ksenia↗
NASA NTRS2021

Functional Autonomy Challenges in Sampling for an Europa Lander Mission

We present a baseline approach to Functional Autonomyfor the purpose of conducting excavation and samplingbehaviors in a proposed Europa Lander mission. Aspects ofthe problems of site selection, excavation progress tracking,and fault identification are related; with particular emphasison parameters peculiar to an icy moon environment. Firstpass approaches to addressing these challenges are presentedin isolation, while motivating the current development goal ofproducing a general Functional Autonomy architecture thatallows state estimation, fault diagnosis, isolation, & recovery(FDIR), and adaptive behaviors to be formulated in concert.

Backes, Paul↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Human-Autonomy Teaming Research in Support of m:N Operations

Since 2019, the NASA and industry partners have been involved in research focused on a novel paradigm for operations of remotely piloted aircraft. This paradigm involves multiple people sharing a fleet of multiple vehicles between them. Referred to as m:N (pronounced “em-to-en”), this configuration describes a ratio where m is the number of operators and N is the number of vehicles. Through force and asset multiplication, the m:N concept seeks to enable a scalable and resilient operation of remotely crewed vehicles. The primary means of obtaining such a robust operation is through allowing a flexible crew of variable size to dynamically attend to the needs of assets in while performing real-time operator workload management. It is in that sense that assets are shared between operators: as needed (such as in events of elevated workload) an operator in an m:N context can “handoff” the responsibility for some amount of assets, nh < N, to be absorbed by the m – 1 crew members on staff. At some time later, these nh assets could be returned to their original owner or they may be further distributed to other crew if called for by the mission. During this panel, I will elaborate on the research activity undertaken by the Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) Laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center over the previous three years. The studies conducted by the HAT Lab range from interviews with subject matter experts, a cognitive walkthrough, a task analysis, and two simulation experiments to-date. During experimentation, pilots made use of an advanced Ground Control Station developed by the HAT Lab and industry partners to simulate m:N operations in two large, metropolitan areas of Southern California: Los Angeles and San Diego. Further experimentation planned over the next few years. Results from our research to-date indicates that pilots of a moderately sized fleet of about a dozen remotely crewed aircraft adequately maintained safety performance and situation awareness of their aircraft, even when presented with unexpected situations of heightened workload.

multi-vehicle control↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Crew Autonomy through Self-Scheduling: Guidelines for Crew Scheduling Performance Envelope and Mitigation Strategies

Future long duration exploration missions (LDEMs) bring new challenges to astronaut crews in deep space, one of which is increased communication latencies with ground stations. As a result, crews will have to behave more autonomously by self-scheduling their own operational timelines in an efficient and effective manner. To support crew autonomy, our team has spent the last few years developing Playbook, a mission planning and scheduling tool. Our research focuses on investigating scheduling performance using Playbook to inform the deployment of novel aids that streamline the timeline creation process and proposing relevant standards and guidelines for autonomous crews in LDEMs. Summarizing yearly progress of research analysis and experiment in HERA.

user experience↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Trustworthy Autonomy for Gateway Vehicle System Manager

This webinar will present techniques for achieving trusted autonomous operations that are being pioneered on the NASA Lunar Gateway Vehicle System Manager (VSM). The challenges of achieving trusted autonomy faced by the VSM project are similar to challenges in underwater autonomous systems. The webinar will describe the overall approach to verification and present in detail the use of design-time (development) assume-guarantee contracts using model checking and runtime (operational) assume-guarantee contracts. The webinar will conclude with a summary of lessons learned to date and future challenges.

Assume-guarantee contracts↗
NASA NTRS2021

Accelerating the Use of Autonomy on Robotic Space Missions –Workshop Summary

The purpose of this workshop was to address the following questions: What are the impediments to making more use of autonomy on robotic space missions? Which of those impediments apply to which kinds of space missions? What is/can/could be done to overcome those impediments? Highlights of the workshop’s treatment of these topics are given herein.

Kaufman, James↗
NASA NTRS2021

Accelerating the Use of Autonomy on Robotic Space Missions –Workshop Summary

The purpose of this workshop was to address the following questions: What are the impediments to making more use of autonomy on robotic space missions? Which of those impediments apply to which kinds of space missions? What is/can/could be done to overcome those impediments? Highlights of the workshop’s treatment of these topics are given herein.

Kaufman, James M.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

What is the Role of Usability and Trust in Autonomy?

Usability encompasses learnability, efficiency, memorability, effectiveness, and satisfaction. NASA’s standards for usability acceptance criteria focus on interfaces that help operators achieve their tasks efficiently, effectively, and with satisfaction. However, discussions on usability, especially regarding future highly automated and autonomous systems, rarely include trust. As NASA plans for long-duration exploration missions, it envisions astronauts operating more independently from Mission Control on Earth. This independence will drive the development of these highly automated and autonomous systems that astronauts will use daily. To prepare for this future, our team has developed a scheduling and execution software tool that facilitates self-scheduling, allowing astronauts to independently manage their own schedule without Mission Control’s involvement. Over many years, we have developed, matured, and evaluated our software tool in extreme environments, prioritizing user-centered design and high usability. These evaluations have included multiple campaigns in NASA analogs, including NEEMO, BASALT, and HERA, as well as technology demonstrations onboard the International Space Station. Our recent research on software interfaces for future astronaut autonomy revealed a strong correlation between usability and trust measures. In a controlled lab experiment, we asked novice users to perform a complex scheduling task, during which the software immediately validated the schedule’s constraints and checked for violations. We collected usability (User Experience Questionnaire, UEQ) and trust (Trust in Automated Systems scale, TAS) measures; significant, strong, and moderate correlations emerged between several of the UEQ metrics and TAS. These results support the argument for investing in usability early to enable and sustain trust in highly automated and autonomous systems.

usability↗