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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 289 records · Page 16

A Machine-Learning Approach to Assess Aircraft Engine System Performance

Artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning, and big data are transforming the global business environment. They have become the most disruptive technologies for organizations to improve workplace efficiency and productivity. This work explored the application of machine learning-based predictive analytics that would enable aircraft engine designers to estimate engine system performance quickly during the conceptual design stage. Supervised machine-learning algorithm was employed to study patterns in an existing database of production and research turbofan engines, and built predictive analytics for use in predicting system performance of new turbofan designs. Specifically, the author developed deep-learning analytics to predict turbofan system weight, using turbofan design parameters as the input. The predictive analytics were trained and deployed in Keras, an open-source neural networks API (application program interface) written in Python, with TensorFlow (an open-source artificial AI library developed by Google) serving as the backend engine. The current engine-weight prediction results, together with those for the TSFC (thrust specific fuel consumption) and core-size predictions that were studied previously by the author, show that machine learning-based predictive analytics can be an effective, time-saving tool for aircraft engine design-space exploration during the conceptual design stage. It would enable expeditious identification of the best engine design amongst several candidates.

Michael T Tong↗

Human Centered Autonomous and Assistant Systems Testbed for Exploration Operations

The Engineering and Mission Operations Directorates at NASA Johnson Space Center are combining laboratories and expertise to establish the Human Centered Autonomous and Assistant Systems Testbed for Exploration Operations. This is a testbed for human centered design, development and evaluation of intelligent autonomous and assistant systems that will be needed for human exploration and development of space. This project will improve human-centered analysis, design and evaluation methods for developing intelligent software. This software will support human-machine cognitive and collaborative activities in future interplanetary work environments where distributed computer and human agents cooperate. We are developing and evaluating prototype intelligent systems for distributed multi-agent mixed-initiative operations. The primary target domain is control of life support systems in a planetary base. Technical approaches will be evaluated for use during extended manned tests in the target domain, the Bioregenerative Advanced Life Support Systems Test Complex (BIO-Plex). A spinoff target domain is the International Space Station (ISS) Mission Control Center (MCC). Prodl}cts of this project include human-centered intelligent software technology, innovative human interface designs, and human-centered software development processes, methods and products. The testbed uses adjustable autonomy software and life support systems simulation models from the Adjustable Autonomy Testbed, to represent operations on the remote planet. Ground operations prototypes and concepts will be evaluated in the Exploration Planning and Operations Center (ExPOC) and Jupiter Facility.

Malin, Jane T.↗

Man-machine interface requirements - advanced technology

Research issues and areas are identified where increased understanding of the human operator and the interaction between the operator and the avionics could lead to improvements in the performance of current and proposed helicopters. Both current and advanced helicopter systems and avionics are considered. Areas critical to man-machine interface requirements include: (1) artificial intelligence; (2) visual displays; (3) voice technology; (4) cockpit integration; and (5) pilot work loads and performance.

Remington, R. W.↗

NASA Ames aerospace systems directorate research

The Aerospace Systems Directorate is one of four research directorates at the NASA Ames Research Center. The Directorate conducts research and technology development for advanced aircraft and aircraft systems in intelligent computational systems and human-machine systems for aeronautics and space. The Directorate manages research and aircraft technology development projects, and operates and maintains major wind tunnels and flight simulation facilities. The Aerospace Systems Directorate's research and technology as it relates to NASA agency goals and specific strategic thrusts are discussed.

Albers, James A.↗

A New Look at NASA: Strategic Research In Information Technology

This viewgraph presentation provides information on research undertaken by NASA to facilitate the development of information technologies. Specific ideas covered here include: 1) Bio/nano technologies: biomolecular and nanoscale systems and tools for assembly and computing; 2) Evolvable hardware: autonomous self-improving, self-repairing hardware and software for survivable space systems in extreme environments; 3) High Confidence Software Technologies: formal methods, high-assurance software design, and program synthesis; 4) Intelligent Controls and Diagnostics: Next generation machine learning, adaptive control, and health management technologies; 5) Revolutionary computing: New computational models to increase capability and robustness to enable future NASA space missions.

Alfano, David↗

The H-Metaphor as a Guideline for Vehicle Automation and Interaction

Good design is not free of form. It does not necessarily happen through a mere sampling of technologies packaged together, through pure analysis, or just by following procedures. Good design begins with inspiration and a vision, a mental image of the end product, which can sometimes be described with a design metaphor. A successful example from the 20th century is the desktop metaphor, which took a real desktop as an orientation for the manipulation of electronic documents on a computer. Initially defined by Xerox, then refined by Apple and others, it could be found on almost every computer by the turn of the 20th century. This paper sketches a specific metaphor for the emerging field of highly automated vehicles, their interactions with human users and with other vehicles. In the introduction, general questions on vehicle automation are raised and related to the physical control of conventional vehicles and to the automation of some late 20th century vehicles. After some words on design metaphors, the H-Metaphor is introduced. More details of the metaphor's source are described and their application to human-machine interaction, automation and management of intelligent vehicles sketched. Finally, risks and opportunities to apply the metaphor to technical applications are discussed.

Flemisch, Frank O.↗

CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT: PATH TO FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS

Long-duration, deep-space exploration missions present significant challenges to crew health and performance. These challenges include the individual and combined effects of microgravity, radiation exposure, isolation, limited resources (mass, volume, power, data and crew time), limited options for evacuation and those associated with delayed or constrained communications, all of which demand greater crew autonomy. Specifically, as the communication delays intensify the further we explore space, the unqualified need for Earth-independent medical operations focused on autonomous diagnosis, treatment and prevention will be key to mission continuation and success. To augment the requisite knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) of a time-constrained crew operating under stressful conditions, combatting fatigue, and facing a potential medical crisis, a robust clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a probable solution that would facilitate, guide and inform Earth-independent medical operations, while assisting crewmembers through various clinical presentations. The Exploration Medical Capability (ExMC) Element of the Human Research Program (HRP) is expanding the boundaries of space medical systems to advance the care of astronauts on future exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit. ExMC is actively identifying and testing next-generation medical care and crew health maintenance technologies. The Clinical Decision Support (CDS) project addresses gap Medical-701 within the Inflight Medical Conditions risk: “Enhance medical capabilities within an exploration medical system.” Though mass, volume, and power will face increasing constraints, the projected computational capabilities of spacecraft systems will increase exponentially as information technology continues to advance this decade and beyond. Hence, data, software and computational resources will play an essential and synergistic role in maintaining crew health, wellness and performance in deep space missions. The focus of the CDS project is to develop recommended requirements for an in-vehicle CDSS that acts as a ‘virtual assistant’ for delivering optimal health, performance and medical care during exploration missions. The CDSS is envisioned as an integrated, software-based tool deployed on a laptop computer or handheld device. The CDSS will assist the crew and ground support when interacting with knowledge/databases (e.g. records, pharmacy, schedule), instrumentation (e.g. imaging, physiological monitoring devices), and habitat (e.g. wellness system, task performance system) and vehicle systems (e.g. environmental system, communication system). In addition, the human interface will employ a context-based approach that accounts for the crew’s situation. Thus, extraneous and clinically/operationally non-relevant information are reduced to avoid an increase in cognitive load. The framework of an ideal spaceflight CDSS is to include core and advanced analytical features that incorporate work from collaborators yet maintain a flexible platform for integrating new technology in the future. In fiscal year 2021 (FY21), the CDS project identified requirements through two primary mechanisms: (i) the development of software implementation prototypes and (ii) the application of systems engineering processes. The CDS project developed and tested a series of increasingly complex system prototypes that were based on use cases derived from the CDSS concept of operations (ConOps). These software implementations yielded insights on CDSS functionality as well as lessons learned that provided the initial requirements for CDSS capability. By applying a systems engineering (SE) approach, medical scenarios provided in the ConOps and the use cases for software implementation underwent functional decomposition to identify CDSS functionality. Also, systems-based modeling language (SysML) tools such as activity diagrams were developed from the same ConOps and use cases to identify CDSS functionality. The lessons learned from software implementation defined both specific requirements and broad areas of requirements. Within these defined broad requirement areas, further analysis of the SE products identified specific capability that resulted in the final functional requirements. In summary, the software prototypes, functional decomposition of the ConOps and use cases, and SysML diagrams provided the basis for the CDSS requirements developed in FY21. In the upcoming year, these requirements will be refined for their final ExMC baseline review in latter FY22.

clinical decision support↗

Open Science for Life in Space: Bioimaging, Data Sharing, and Tools for Knowledge Discovery

Precious space-flown biological experiments have both multi-omic and phenotypic data which NASA strives to make maximally open access for reuse. Currently a number of these space-relevant bioimaging datasets are being reused for AI/ML approaches. NASA Ames Life Science Data Archive and NASA GeneLab are working to make all current and future bioimaging data even more accessible and reusable. Standards for collection and curation are being implemented to enable scientists worldwide access to these data for further discovery and use.

data science↗

2022 Spring Internship Exit Presentation

As efforts of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) continue to digitize the air traffic management (ATM) domain, there is countless times of need for downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as named entity recognition, text summarization, classification, and more. Although there are a plethora of open-sourced pre-trained transformer models in the NLP field such as BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, and GPT-3, these models are trained on general corpora and perform poorly on domain-specific terminology and phraseology seen in ATM documents such as Notice to Airmen (NOTAMs) and Letters of Agreement (LoA). Our proposed research objective will be to first gather a large corpus of air traffic management related documents, orders, notices, books, technical papers, conference papers, articles, and other miscellaneous sources of text data from the FAA, NASA, and accredited conference and publication societies. After gathering this data, many steps will have to be taken to collate and preprocess the data into a format understandable by our test transformer models. Thirdly, we will set up training pipelines to train the RoBERTa model on its unsupervised training task masked language modelling (MLM) using resources provided by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facilities. Finally, these fine-tuned transformer models will be evaluated on their performance on down-stream NLP tasks as mentioned above, to show whether they will be effective when working with ATM related data or not. Once complete, this model could be made open-sourced on the HuggingFace website, where the rest of the ATM community can access and utilize this tool.

NLP↗

Machine Learning to Increase the Quality and Repeatability of 3D Printing - Workflow

The imprecise nature of three-dimensional (3D) printing limits the technology’s use beyond prototyping. For production of end-use parts, such as those for aerospace applications, improvements are needed to enhance quality and repeatability. Much of the difficulty in obtaining high quality printed parts lies in finding optimum printing parameters. Currently, this requires trial and error performed by an expert. Finding the optimum printing parameters is also obfuscated by the variation in optimum parameters throughout the part due to part geometry and printer effects. To allow for locally optimized printing parameters, one can envision a machine learning algorithm that could take in an object, predict the best printing parameters, and communicate these parameters to a printer. With this scenario in mind, we developed a tool that can predict and implement locally optimized printing parameters in 3D printing. This tool consists of elements designed to detect errors in a printed part, predict the probability of local flaws occurring at each point in the part, and select the optimal local parameters for the highest quality part given hardware limitations. The results of this work were highlighted in Advanced Materials Technologies. In this paper, we will discuss in greater depth the workflow and algorithms involved with this tool that were not detailed in the journal publication.

additive manufacturing↗

EOSDIS Data Archival

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Machine Learning↗

Science Autonomy for Ocean Worlds Astrobiology: A Perspective

Astrobiology missions to ocean worlds in our solar system must overcome both scientific and technological challenges due to extreme temperature and radiation conditions, long communication times, and limited bandwidth. While such tools could not replace ground-based analysis by science and engineering teams, machine learning algorithms could enhance the science return of these missions through development of autonomous science capabilities. Examples of science autonomy include onboard data analysis and subsequent instrument optimization, data prioritization (for transmission), and real-time decision-making based on data analysis. Similar advances could be made to develop streamlined data processing software for rapid ground-based analyses. Here we discuss several ways machine learning and autonomy could be used for astrobiology missions, including landing site selection, prioritization and targeting of samples, classification of “features” (e.g., proposed biosignatures) and novelties (uncharacterized, “new” features, which may be of most interest to agnostic astrobiological investigations), and data transmission.

ocean worlds↗

Requirement Discovery Using Embedded Knowledge Graph With ChatGPT

The field of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is witnessing a transformation with innovations such as electric aircraft and increasingly automated airspace operations. Within AAM, the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) con-cept focuses on providing air-taxi services in densely populated urban areas. This research introduces the utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4, to enhance the UAM Requirement discovery process. This study explores two distinct approaches to leverage LLMs in the context of UAM Requirement discovery. The first approach evaluates the LLM's ability to provide responses without relying on additional outside systems, such as a relational or graph database. Instead, a vector store provides relevant information to the LLM based on the user’s question, a process known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). The second approach integrates the LLM with a graph database. The LLM acts as an intermediary between the user and the graph database, translating user questions into cypher queries for the database and database responses into human-readable answers for the user. Our team implemented and tested both solutions to analyze require-ments within a UAM dataset. This paper will talk about our approaches, implementations, and findings related to both approaches.

systems engineering↗

Requirement Discovery Using Embedded Knowledge Graph with ChatGPT

The field of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is witnessing a transformation with innovations such as electric aircraft and increasingly automated airspace operations. Within AAM, the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) concept focuses on providing air-taxi services in densely populated urban areas. This research introduces the utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4, to enhance the UAM Requirement discovery process. This study explores two distinct approaches to leverage LLMs in the context of UAM Requirement discovery. The first approach evaluates the LLM's ability to provide responses without relying on additional outside systems, such as a relational or graph database. Instead, a vector store provides relevant information to the LLM based on the user’s question, a process known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). The second approach integrates the LLM with a graph database. The LLM acts as an intermediary between the user and the graph database, translating user questions into cypher queries for the database and database responses into human-readable answers for the user. Our team implemented and tested both solutions to analyze requirements within a UAM dataset. This paper will talk about our approaches, implementations, and findings related to both approaches.

systems engineering↗

Requirement Discovery Using Embedded Knowledge Graph With ChatGPT - Poster

The field of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is witnessing a transformation with innovations such as electric aircraft and increasingly automated airspace operations. Within AAM, the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) con-cept focuses on providing air-taxi services in densely populated urban areas. This research introduces the utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4, to enhance the UAM Requirement discovery process. This study explores two distinct approaches to leverage LLMs in the context of UAM Requirement discovery. The first approach evaluates the LLM's ability to provide responses without relying on additional outside systems, such as a relational or graph database. Instead, a vector store provides relevant information to the LLM based on the user’s question, a process known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). The second approach integrates the LLM with a graph database. The LLM acts as an intermediary between the user and the graph database, translating user questions into cypher queries for the database and database responses into human-readable answers for the user. Our team implemented and tested both solutions to analyze require-ments within a UAM dataset. This paper will talk about our approaches, implementations, and findings related to both approaches.

systems engineering↗

Evaluating Machine Learning Approaches to Plume Tracking

On July 15, 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HTHH) submarine volcano erupted, propelling trace gasses and ash through the troposphere and up into the stratosphere. Previous studies manually tracked the aerosol and trace gas plumes over time across different positions in the southern hemisphere. Using imagery from NASA’s Earth Observing System, including MODIS aerosol products and OMI sulfur dioxide products, this research demonstrates how open-source machine learning (ML) models, like Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM), can perform automatic plume tracking following the Hunga Tonga eruption. This extensible methodology, and modular data processing and modeling pipeline, establishes a framework for systematically and rapidly studying natural disasters, including additional volcanic eruptions and large-scale wildfires. By combining advanced machine learning techniques, such as SAM’s zero-shot learning, with large volumes of NASA’s Earth Observation and remote sensing data, this work shows how AI and open science can accelerate research and generate actionable results, even for unprecedented events. The tools and technologies presented here can help translate earth science to action from NASA’s current and future Earth observing satellite missions, and assist researchers and stakeholders in understanding, mapping, and responding to natural disasters in a changing world.

machine learning↗

Optimization-Based Parametric Design via High-Fidelity Simulation: Overview + Examples

Design-Build-Test approaches for developing spaceflight hardware are prohibitively time and cost intensive and often lead to suboptimal mechanism designs. Approaches that couple machine learning and high-fidelity physics simulation could eliminate the need for hardware prototyping and dramatically accelerate the engineering design cycle, ultimately reducing cost. This talk presents a modular NASA-developed toolchain to optimize hardware mechanisms in a virtual environment using numerical optimization and multi-body physics simulation and includes example applications related to rigid wheel design for autonomous rovers and computational fluid dynamics.

optimization↗