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NASA NTRS1994

Navy Omni-Directional Vehicle (ODV) development program

The Omni-Directional Vehicle (ODV) development program sponsored by the Office of Naval Research at the Coastal Systems Station has investigated the application of ODV technology for use in the Navy shipboard environment. ODV technology as originally received by the Navy in the form of the Cadillac-Gage Side Mover Vehicle was applicable to the shipboard environment with the potential to overcome conditions of reduced traction, ship motion, decks heeled at high angles, obstacles, and confined spaces. Under the Navy program, ODV technology was investigated and a series of experimental vehicles were built and successfully tested under extremely demanding conditions. The ODV drive system has been found to be applicable to autonomous, remotely, or manually operated vehicles. Potential commercial applications include multi-directional forklift trucks, automatic guided vehicles employed in manufacturing environments, and remotely controlled platforms used in nuclear facilities or for hazardous waste clean up tasks.

Mcgowen, Hillery↗

NASA NTRS2015

Formation Flying for Satellites and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The shrinking size of satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is enabling lower cost missions. As sensors and electronics continue to downsize, the next step is multiple vehicles providing different perspectives or variations for more precise measurements. While flying a single satellite or UAV autonomously is a challenge, flying multiple vehicles in a precise formation is even more challenging. The goal of this project is to develop a scalable mesh network between vehicles (satellites or UAVs) to share real-time position data and maintain formations autonomously. Newly available low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf credit card size computers will be used as the basis for this network. Mesh networking techniques will be used to provide redundant links and a flexible network. The Small Projects Rapid Integration and Test Environment Lab will be used to simulate formation flying of satellites. UAVs built by the Aero-M team will be used to demonstrate the formation flying in the West Test Area. The ability to test in flight on NASA-owned UAVs allows this technology to achieve a high Technology Readiness Level (TRL) (TRL-4 for satellites and TRL-7 for UAVs). The low cost of small UAVs and the availability of a large test range (West Test Area) dramatically reduces the expense of testing. The end goal is for this technology to be ready to use on any multiple satellite or UAV mission.

Merrill, Garrick↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Risk-Reduction Autonomy Implementation to Enable NASA Artemis Missions

To achieve NASA’s Artemis program mission objectives a high level of autonomy that is ubiquitous throughout the systems that are being developed will be necessary. The autonomous systems of Artemis will require a distributed autonomy capability, with autonomous systems organized functionally in a hierarchical architecture, where systems at higher levels of the hierarchy have authority over systems at lower levels. The challenge of developing autonomy technologies and Concepts of Operations (ConOps) for Artemis has been undertaken by the NASA Gateway Working Group. This group has developed requirements, architectures, ConOps, and interface control documents (ICDs), in the context of a hierarchical distributed architecture that includes the following: a Vehicle System Manager (VSM) that autonomously manages the entire Gateway; Module System Managers (MSMs) that autonomously manage each module; and System Managers (SMs) that autonomously manage systems within a module (i.e. ECLSS). A substantially high level of autonomy needs to be achieved by each element of the hierarchy (VSM, MSM, SM) to meet requirements for uncrewed operations; this includes conditions that will have minimal and/or delayed ground intervention (i.e. requirements for sustainability for months of operation without crew or ground support). To advance an implementation of this autonomy design (Gateway Autonomy Design – GAD), a collaboration was established between the Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASL) at NASA Stennis Space Center and Lockheed Martin. The objectives of this partnership were the following: (1) to implement autonomy at the VSM, MSM, and SM levels; (2) to implement communications among a VSM, 2 MSMs, ORION (a visiting vehicle somewhat equivalent to a module) and 1 SM (a power system), and (3) test autonomous operations with representative use cases. A SM backed by a high-fidelity simulation was created to facilitate demonstrations of use cases that originated in a system of a module. Communication between the VSM and MSMs was implemented according to Concepts of Operations and Interface Control Documents (ICDs). Demonstrations were conducted to address nominal and off-nominal operations and multi-module interactions with the VSM. Additionally, user interfaces were created to provide awareness about ongoing processes and results while enhancing the demonstration. Demonstrations included the following use cases: (1) Orion as visiting vehicle registers with VSM; (2) VSM reschedules a module’s timelines when another module’s MSM task fails; and (3) a module’s Power System Manager (PSM) demonstration that included component failure diagnostics, tracing component failure to effected components, which in turn, reports failure information up to the VSM for acknowledgement and display. This paper will describe the detailed technology and autonomous systems developed, and the integrated multi-module demonstrations conducted. Also, challenges that must be met to fully implement the GAD defined by Gateway will be addressed.

Fernando Figueroa↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Risk-Reduction Autonomy Implementation to Enable NASA Artemis Missions

To achieve NASA’s Artemis program mission objectives a high level of autonomy and ubiquitous autonomy throughout the systems that are being developed will be necessary. The autonomous systems of Artemis will require a distributed autonomy capability, with autonomous systems organized functionally in a hierarchical architecture, where systems at higher levels of the hierarchy have authority over systems at lower levels. The challenge of developing autonomy technologies and concepts of operations for Artemis has been undertaken by the NASA Gateway Working Group. This group has developed requirements, architectures, concepts of operations, and interface control documents, in the context of a hierarchical distributed architecture that includes the following: a Vehicle System Manager (VSM) that autonomously manages the entire Gateway; Module System Managers (MSMs) that autonomously manage each module; and System Managers (SMs) that autonomously manage systems within a module(i.e. ECLSS).A substantially high level of autonomy needs to be achieved by each element of the hierarchy (VSM, MSM, SM)to meet requirements for uncrewed operations; this includes conditions that will have minimal and/or delayed ground intervention (i.e. requirements for sustainability for months of operation without crew or ground support). To advance an implementation of this autonomy design (Gateway Autonomy Design –GAD), a collaboration was established between the Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASL) at NASA Stennis Space Center and Lockheed Martin. The objectives of this partnership were the following: (1)to implement autonomy at the VSM, MSM, and SM levels;(2) to implement communications among a VSM, 2 MSMs, ORION (a visiting vehicle somewhat equivalent to a module) and 1 SM (a power system), and (3) test autonomous operations with representative use cases. A SM backed by a high-fidelity simulation was created to facilitate demonstrations of use cases that originated in a system of a module. Communication between the VSM and MSMs was implemented according to Concepts of Operations and Interface Control Documents (ICDs). Demonstrations were conducted to address nominal and off-nominal operations and multi-module interactions with VSM. Additionally, user interfaces were created to provide awareness about ongoing processes and results while enhancing the demonstration. Demonstrations included the following use cases: (1)Orion as visiting vehicle registers with VSM;(2) VSM reschedules a module’s timelines when another module’s MSM task fails; and (3) a module’s Power System Manager (PSM) standalone demonstration that included component failure diagnostics, tracing component failure to effected components, which in turn, reports failure information up to the VSM for acknowledgement and display. This paper will describe the detailed technology and autonomous systems developed, and the integrated multi-module demonstrations conducted. Also, challenges that must be met to fully implement the GAD defined by Gateway will be addressed.

Autonomous Systems↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A Framework for Sense and Follow Convoys for Collective Autonomous Mobility

Convoys are collections of vehicles that share similar velocity profiles. In the sense-and follow convoy construct, a vehicle can follow a member of an existing convoy resulting in convoy chaining. We prove conditions under which this can occur such that the resulting convoy chain is bounded and the velocities of all members converge to the leader velocity through locally distributed control algorithms. To assess the approach, we utilize a six degree-of-freedom rigid body vehicle dynamics model for each agent. A dynamic inversion based control law is used to track the desired trajectory generated by the convoy algorithms. To simulate the system, we utilize Unity, a cross-platform game engine, where 3-dimensional terrain, building, and vehicle data can be visualized. Numerous simulations are presented to illustrate the concept.

convoys↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A Framework for Sense and Follow Convoys for Collective Autonomous Mobility

convoys↗

NASA NTRS2020

Intelligent Contingency Management for Urban Air Mobility

The third aviation revolution is seeking to enable transportation where users have access to immediate and flexible air travel; the users dictate trip origin, destination and timing. One of the major components of this vision is urban air mobility (UAM) for the masses. UAM means a safe and efficient system for vehicles to move passengers and cargo within a city. In order to reach UAM’s full market potential the vehicle will have to be autonomous. One of the primary challenges of autonomous flight is dealing with off-nominal events, both common and unforeseen; thus, intelligent contingency management (ICM) is one of the enabling technologies. In this context, the vehicle has to be aware of its internal state and external environment at all times, ascertain its capability and make decisions about mission completion or modification. All of these functions require data to model and assess the environment and then take actions based on these models. Necessarily, there is uncertainty associated with the data and the models generated from it. Since we are dealing with safety-critical systems, one of the main challenges of ICM is to generate sufficient data and to minimize its uncertainty to enable practical and safe decision making. We propose an overall architecture that incorporates deterministic and learning algorithms together to assess vehicle capabilities, project these into the future and make decisions on mission management level. A layered approach allows for mature parts and technologies to be integrated into early highly automated vehicles before the final state of autonomy is reached.

data-driven systems↗

NASA NTRS2000

Passive Night Vision Sensor Comparison for Unmanned Ground Vehicle Stereo Vision Navigation

One goal of the "Demo III" unmanned ground vehicle program is to enable autonomous nighttime navigation at speeds of up to 10 m.p.h. To perform obstacle detection at night with stereo vision will require night vision cameras that produce adequate image quality for the driving speeds, vehicle dynamics, obstacle sizes, and scene conditions that will be encountered. This paper analyzes the suitability of four classes of night vision cameras (3-5 micrometer cooled FLIR, 8-12 micrometer cooled FLIR, 8-12 micrometer uncooled FLIR, and image intensifiers) for night stereo vision, using criteria based on stereo matching quality, image signal to noise ratio, motion blur and synchronization capability. We find that only cooled FLIRs will enable stereo vision performance that meets the goals of the Demo III program for nighttime autonomous mobility.

Owens, Ken↗

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 NTRS2018

Autonomous Nested Search for Hydrothermal Venting

Ocean Worlds in the outer solar system represent one of the best chances for the discovery of extra-terrestrial life. Bodies, such as Europa and Enceladus, are thought to harbor liquid oceans, often encased in a thick icy shell. In order to further investigate these oceans, a new mission concept needs to be developed, a submersible craft. This vehicle would be required to traverse the icy shell and travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers to survey the ocean below. In doing this, the vehicle might be out of contact for weeks or months at a time. The vehicle must be able to autonomously detect,locate, and study features of interest. One potential target is hydrothermal venting, due to their unique ecosystems on Earth. We have developed an autonomous, nested search strategy to locate sources of hydrothermal venting based on currently used methods. To test this search technique a simulation environment was developed using a hydrothermal plume dispersion simulation and a vehicle model. We show the effectiveness of the search method in this environment.

Seewald, Jeffrey S.↗

NASA NTRS2015

Flight Testing a Real-Time Hazard Detection System for Safe Lunar Landing on the Rocket-Powered Morpheus Vehicle

The Hazard Detection System (HDS) is a component of the ALHAT (Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology) sensor suite, which together provide a lander Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) system with the relevant measurements necessary to enable safe precision landing under any lighting conditions. The HDS consists of a stand-alone compute element (CE), an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and a gimbaled flash LIDAR sensor that are used, in real-time, to generate a Digital Elevation Map (DEM) of the landing terrain, detect candidate safe landing sites for the vehicle through Hazard Detection (HD), and generate hazard-relative navigation (HRN) measurements used for safe precision landing. Following an extensive ground and helicopter test campaign, ALHAT was integrated onto the Morpheus rocket-powered terrestrial test vehicle in March 2014. Morpheus and ALHAT then performed five successful free flights at the simulated lunar hazard field constructed at the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at Kennedy Space Center, for the first time testing the full system on a lunar-like approach geometry in a relevant dynamic environment. During these flights, the HDS successfully generated DEMs, correctly identified safe landing sites and provided HRN measurements to the vehicle, marking the first autonomous landing of a NASA rocket-powered vehicle in hazardous terrain. This paper provides a brief overview of the HDS architecture and describes its in-flight performance.

Avoidance↗

NASA NTRS2015

Flight Testing ALHAT Precision Landing Technologies Integrated Onboard the Morpheus Rocket Vehicle

A suite of prototype sensors, software, and avionics developed within the NASA Autonomous precision Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) project were terrestrially demonstrated onboard the NASA Morpheus rocket-propelled Vertical Testbed (VTB) in 2014. The sensors included a LIDAR-based Hazard Detection System (HDS), a Navigation Doppler LIDAR (NDL) velocimeter, and a long-range Laser Altimeter (LAlt) that enable autonomous and safe precision landing of robotic or human vehicles on solid solar system bodies under varying terrain lighting conditions. The flight test campaign with the Morpheus vehicle involved a detailed integration and functional verification process, followed by tether testing and six successful free flights, including one night flight. The ALHAT sensor measurements were integrated into a common navigation solution through a specialized ALHAT Navigation filter that was employed in closed-loop flight testing within the Morpheus Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) subsystem. Flight testing on Morpheus utilized ALHAT for safe landing site identification and ranking, followed by precise surface-relative navigation to the selected landing site. The successful autonomous, closed-loop flight demonstrations of the prototype ALHAT system have laid the foundation for the infusion of safe, precision landing capabilities into future planetary exploration missions.

Carson, John M. III↗

NASA NTRS2014

NASA's Space Launch System Takes Shape: Progress Toward Safe, Affordable, Exploration

Development of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) exploration-class heavy lift rocket has moved from the formulation phase to implementation in 3 years and will make significant progress this year toward its first launch, slated December 2017. SLS represents a safe, affordable, and evolutionary path to development of an unprecedented capability for future human and robotic exploration and use of space. For the United States current development is focused on a configuration with a 70 metric ton (t) payload to low Earth orbit (LEO), more than double any operational vehicle. This version will launch NASA's Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) on its first autonomous flight beyond the Moon and back, as well as the first crewed Orion flight. SLS is designed to evolve to a 130 t lift capability that can reduce mission costs, simplify payload design, reduce trip times, and lower overall risk. Each vehicle element completed its respective Preliminary Design Reviews, followed by the SLS Program. The Program also completed the Key Decision Point-C milestone to move from formulation to implementation in 2014. NASA hasthorized the program to proceed to Critical Design Review, scheduled for 2015. Accomplihments to date include: manufacture of core stage test hardware, as well as preparations for testing the world's most powerful solid rocket boosters and main engines that flew 135 successful Space Shuttle missions. The Program's success to date is due to prudent use of existing technology, infrastructure, and workforce; streamlined management approach; and judicious use of new technologies. This paper will discuss SLS Program successes over the past year and examine milestones and challenges ahead. The SLS Program and its elements are managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC).

Askins, Bruce R.↗

NASA NTRS2009

Flight Test Performance of a High Precision Navigation Doppler Lidar

A navigation Doppler Lidar (DL) was developed at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) for high precision velocity measurements from a lunar or planetary landing vehicle in support of the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) project. A unique feature of this DL is that it has the capability to provide a precision velocity vector which can be easily separated into horizontal and vertical velocity components and high accuracy line of sight (LOS) range measurements. This dual mode of operation can provide useful information, such as vehicle orientation relative to the direction of travel, and vehicle attitude relative to the sensor footprint on the ground. System performance was evaluated in a series of helicopter flight tests over the California desert. This paper provides a description of the DL system and presents results obtained from these flight tests.

Pierrottet, Diego↗

NASA NTRS2011

The Planning Execution Monitoring Architecture

The Planning Execution Monitoring (PEM) architecture is a design concept for developing autonomous cockpit command and control software. The PEM architecture is designed to reduce the operations costs in the space transportation system through the use of automation while improving safety and operability of the system. Specifically, the PEM autonomous framework enables automatic performance of many vehicle operations that would typically be performed by a human. Also, this framework supports varying levels of autonomous control, ranging from fully automatic to fully manual control. The PEM autonomous framework interfaces with the core flight software to perform flight procedures. It can either assist human operators in performing procedures or autonomously execute routine cockpit procedures based on the operational context. Most importantly, the PEM autonomous framework promotes and simplifies the capture, verification, and validation of the flight operations knowledge. Through a hierarchical decomposition of the domain knowledge, the vehicle command and control capabilities are divided into manageable functional "chunks" that can be captured and verified separately. These functional units, each of which has the responsibility to manage part of the vehicle command and control, are modular, re-usable, and extensible. Also, the functional units are self-contained and have the ability to plan and execute the necessary steps for accomplishing a task based upon the current mission state and available resources. The PEM architecture has potential for application outside the realm of spaceflight, including management of complex industrial processes, nuclear control, and control of complex vehicles such as submarines or unmanned air vehicles.

Wang, Lui↗

NASA NTRS2005

Autonomous Flight Safety System Road Test

On February 3, 2005, Kennedy Space Center (KSC) conducted the first Autonomous Flight Safety System (AFSS) test on a moving vehicle -- a van driven around the KSC industrial area. A subset of the Phase III design was used consisting of a single computer, GPS receiver, and UPS antenna. The description and results of this road test are described in this report.AFSS is a joint KSC and Wallops Flight Facility project that is in its third phase of development. AFSS is an independent subsystem intended for use with Expendable Launch Vehicles that uses tracking data from redundant onboard sensors to autonomously make flight termination decisions using software-based rules implemented on redundant flight processors. The goals of this project are to increase capabilities by allowing launches from locations that do not have or cannot afford extensive ground-based range safety assets, to decrease range costs, and to decrease reaction time for special situations.

Simpson, James C.↗

NASA NTRS2012

Fully Self-Contained Vision-Aided Navigation and Landing of a Micro Air Vehicle Independent from External Sensor Inputs

Direct-lift micro air vehicles have important applications in reconnaissance. In order to conduct persistent surveillance in urban environments, it is essential that these systems can perform autonomous landing maneuvers on elevated surfaces that provide high vantage points without the help of any external sensor and with a fully contained on-board software solution. In this paper, we present a micro air vehicle that uses vision feedback from a single down looking camera to navigate autonomously and detect an elevated landing platform as a surrogate for a roof top. Our method requires no special preparation (labels or markers) of the landing location. Rather, leveraging the planar character of urban structure, the landing platform detection system uses a planar homography decomposition to detect landing targets and produce approach waypoints for autonomous landing. The vehicle control algorithm uses a Kalman filter based approach for pose estimation to fuse visual SLAM (PTAM) position estimates with IMU data to correct for high latency SLAM inputs and to increase the position estimate update rate in order to improve control stability. Scale recovery is achieved using inputs from a sonar altimeter. In experimental runs, we demonstrate a real-time implementation running on-board a micro aerial vehicle that is fully self-contained and independent from any external sensor information. With this method, the vehicle is able to search autonomously for a landing location and perform precision landing maneuvers on the detected targets.

autonomous landing↗

NASA NTRS1991

Piloting decision aid for spacecraft proximity operations

The concept of a decision aid to assist the piloting of a powered vehicle during a near-field (less than 2000 feet) rendezvous to another spacecraft is discussed. Using Space Shuttle rendezvous with an orbiting satellite as an example, extensive practice is normally required to successfully effect such a rendezvous with a minimum of propellant. As a rule, variations on a 'point and shoot' technique are optimized and used as much as possible. A piloting decision aid (PDA) to assist in the pointing process was conceived and is in the preliminary stages of development. This concept may be applied to Space Shuttle proximity operations for berthing with Space Station Freedom (SSF), for Shuttle rendezvous with other spacecraft, or for autonomous rendezvous of any unmanned vehicle with SSF. The concept orginated with a task order from NASA JSC for an automated piloting procedure and was influenced by an early air-to-air missile envelope display.

Pierce, Cole J.↗