SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “Autonomy”

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.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,207 records · Page 67

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

NASA NTRS2002

An End-to-End Architecture for Science Goal Driven Observing

New observatories will have greater on-board storage capacity and on-board processing capabilities. The new bottleneck will be download capacity. The cost of downlink time and limitations of bandwidth will end the era where all exposure data is downloaded and all data processing is performed on the ground. In addition, observing campaigns involving inherently variable targets will need scheduling flexibility to focus observing time and data download on exposures that are scientifically interesting. The ability to quickly recognize and react to such events by re-prioritizing the observing schedule will be an essential characteristic for maximizing scientific returns. It will also be a step towards increasing spacecraft autonomy, a major goal of NASA's strategic plan. The science goal monitoring (SGM) system is a proof-of-concept effort to address these challenges. We are developing an interactive distributed system that will use on-board processing and storage combined with event-driven interfaces with ground-based processing and operations, to enable fast re-prioritization of observing schedules, and to minimize time spent on non-optimized observations. SGM is initially aimed towards time-tagged observing modes used frequently in spectroscopic studies of varying targets. In particular, the SGM is collaborating with the proposed MIDEX-class mission Kronos team. The variable targets that Kronos seeks to study make an adaptive system such as SGM particularly valuable for achieving mission goals. However, the architecture and interfaces will also be designed for easy adaptability to other observing platforms, including ground-based systems and to work with different scheduling and pipeline processing systems. This talk will focus on our strategy for developing SGM and the technical challenges that we have encountered. We will discuss the SGM architecture as it applies to the Kronos mission and explain how it is scalable to other missions.

Jones, Jeremy↗

NASA NTRS1998

A Hybrid Procedural/Deductive Executive for Autonomous Spacecraft

The New Millennium Remote Agent (NMRA) will be the first AI system to control an actual spacecraft. The spacecraft domain places a strong premium on autonomy and requires dynamic recoveries and robust concurrent execution, all in the presence of tight real-time deadlines, changing goals, scarce resource constraints, and a wide variety of possible failures. To achieve this level of execution robustness, we have integrated a procedural executive based on generic procedures with a deductive model-based executive. A procedural executive provides sophisticated control constructs such as loops, parallel activity, locks, and synchronization which are used for robust schedule execution, hierarchical task decomposition, and routine configuration management. A deductive executive provides algorithms for sophisticated state inference and optimal failure recover), planning. The integrated executive enables designers to code knowledge via a combination of procedures and declarative models, yielding a rich modeling capability suitable to the challenges of real spacecraft control. The interface between the two executives ensures both that recovery sequences are smoothly merged into high-level schedule execution and that a high degree of reactivity is retained to effectively handle additional failures during recovery.

Pell, Barney↗

NASA NTRS1998

Testing Planetary Rovers: Technologies, Perspectives, and Lessons Learned

Rovers are a vital component of NASA's strategy for manned and unmanned exploration of space. For the past five years, the Intelligent Mechanisms Group at the NASA Ames Research Center has conducted a vigorous program of field testing of rovers from both technology and science team productivity perspective. In this talk, I will give an overview of the the last two years of the test program, focusing on tests conducted in the Painted Desert of Arizona, the Atacama desert in Chile, and on IMG participation in the Mars Pathfinder mission. An overview of autonomy, manipulation, and user interface technologies developed in response to these missions will be presented, and lesson's learned in these missions and their impact on future flight missions will be presented. I will close with some perspectives on how the testing program has affected current rover systems.

Thomas, Hans↗

NASA NTRS1998

Rovers for Mars Polar Exploration

Mobility is a generic capability needed for Mars exploration. Requirements for mobility range from those to get observations of individual rocks all the way to getting high resolution observations of regional areas. Table 1 shows the required-range of mobility to achieve various tasks. The Pathfinder mission and field experiments simulating rover missions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] provide guidance as to rover capabilities that can reasonably be expected in the next decade. Rover mobility can be accomplished in a variety of ways, the most common being wheels or tracks and legged-walkers. Wheeled vehicles can traverse over rocks smaller than 1/2 wheel diameter, and with path planning to avoid larger rocks, can traverse terrains comparable to those seen on Mars in the Viking and Pathfinder landing sites. Slopes of 45 deg can be easily negotiated by wheeled rovers. Walking vehicles can negotiate even more complex terrain but requires computation capability to select each leg placement. Extremely complex terrain was traversed by the Nomad II walker which descended into (and most of the way out of) an active volcanic caldera (Mount Spur, AK) in 1995, although a slope failure eventually resulted in broken legs. The traverse range of a rover is limited by its science objectives, performance capabilities, and operational lifetime. The speed of rover traverse is a relative minor factor. With a different communication system, and no stops for science experiments, Sojourner could probably have traveled a kilometer. But, achieving land speed records is not a major objective of a science mission. Achieving science objectives requires targeting particular objects and studying them in detail, and the associated operational requirements will likely limit rover traverse range significantly. Traversing from target to target requires relatively few command cycles provided the traverse is over a short enough distance that it can be adequately planned. An operational goal of 100 m traverse per command cycle, arriving at a predetermined target, seems achievable. Investigating science targets requiring manipulator or instrument placement and sample collection will likely take several command cycles per target. Mission simulations [6] have demonstrated that traverse dI stances of 100-300 m, with detailed investigation of 5-10 targets take 50-100 command cycles, not unlike the Pathfinder experience in spite of the use of larger, faster, more capable rovers. Significant advances in rover autonomy will be needed to improve this Situation and it is not clear how much improvement will be brought to flight programs in the next decade. Dust accumulation on solar panels degrades power over time and, without dust removal, rover operational lifetimes may be limited to 90 sols.

Stoker, Carol↗

NASA NTRS2002

Teamwork Reasoning and Multi-Satellite Missions

NASA is rapidly moving towards the use of spatially distributed multiple satellites operating in near Earth orbit and Deep Space. Effective operation of such multi-satellite constellations raises many key research issues. In particular, the satellites will be required to cooperate with each other as a team that must achieve common objectives with a high degree of autonomy from ground based operations. The multi-agent research community has made considerable progress in investigating the challenges of realizing such teamwork. In this report, we discuss some of the teamwork issues that will be faced by multi-satellite operations. The basis of the discussion is a particular proposed mission, the Magnetospheric MultiScale mission to explore Earth's magnetosphere. We describe this mission and then consider how multi-agent technologies might be applied in the design and operation of these missions. We consider the potential benefits of these technologies as well as the research challenges that will be raised in applying them to NASA multi-satellite missions. We conclude with some recommendations for future work.

Marsella, Stacy C.↗

NASA NTRS2002

Instrument Deployment for Mars Rovers

Future Mars rovers, such as the planned 2009 MSL rover, require sufficient autonomy to robustly approach rock targets and place an instrument in contact with them. It took the 1997 Sojourner Mars rover between 3 and 5 communications cycles to accomplish this. This paper describes the technologies being developed and integrated onto the NASA Ames K9 prototype Mars rover to both accomplish this in one cycle, and to extend the complexity and duration of operations that a Mars rover can accomplish without intervention from mission control.

Pedersen, Liam↗

NASA NTRS2002

The Personal Satellite Assistant: An Internal Spacecraft Autonomous Mobile Monitor

This paper presents an overview of the research and development effort at the NASA Ames Research Center to create an internal spacecraft autonomous mobile monitor capable of performing intra-vehicular sensing activities by autonomously navigating onboard the International Space Station. We describe the capabilities, mission roles, rationale, high-level functional requirements, and design challenges for an autonomous mobile monitor. The rapid prototyping design methodology used, in which five prototypes of increasing fidelity are designed, is described as well as the status of these prototypes, of which two are operational and being tested, and one is actively being designed. The physical test facilities used to perform ground testing are briefly described, including a micro-gravity test facility that permits a prototype to propel itself in 3 dimensions with 6 degrees-of-freedom as if it were in an micro-gravity environment. We also describe an overview of the autonomy framework and its components including the software simulators used in the development process. Sample mission test scenarios are also described. The paper concludes with a discussion of future and related work followed by the summary.

Dorais, Gregory A.↗

NASA NTRS2003

Agent Based Software for the Autonomous Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft

Distributed satellite systems is an enabling technology for many future NASA/DoD earth and space science missions, such as MMS, MAXIM, Leonardo, and LISA [1, 2, 3]. While formation flying offers significant science benefits, to reduce the operating costs for these missions it will be essential that these multiple vehicles effectively act as a single spacecraft by performing coordinated observations. Autonomous guidance, navigation, and control as part of a coordinated fleet-autonomy is a key technology that will help accomplish this complex goal. This is no small task, as most current space missions require significant input from the ground for even relatively simple decisions such as thruster burns. Work for the NMP DS1 mission focused on the development of the New Millennium Remote Agent (NMRA) architecture for autonomous spacecraft control systems. NMRA integrates traditional real-time monitoring and control with components for constraint-based planning, robust multi-threaded execution, and model-based diagnosis and reconfiguration. The complexity of using an autonomous approach for space flight software was evident when most of its capabilities were stripped off prior to launch (although more capability was uplinked subsequently, and the resulting demonstration was very successful).

How, Jonathan P.↗

NASA NTRS2002

NASA's Autonomous Formation Flying Technology Demonstration, Earth Observing-1(EO-1)

NASA's first autonomous formation flying mission, the New Millennium Program's (NMP) Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) spacecraft, recently completed its principal goal of demonstrating advanced formation control technology. This paper provides an overview of the evolution of an onboard system that was developed originally as a ground mission planning and operations tool. We discuss the Goddard Space Flight Center s formation flying algorithm, the onboard flight design and its implementation, the interface and functionality of the onboard system, and the implementation of a Kalman filter based GPS data smoother. A number of safeguards that allow the incremental phasing in of autonomy and alleviate the potential for mission-impacting anomalies from the on- board autonomous system are discussed. A comparison of the maneuvers planned onboard using the EO-1 autonomous control system to those from the operational ground-based maneuver planning system is presented to quantify our success. The maneuvers discussed encompass reactionary and routine formation maintenance. Definitive orbital data is presented that verifies all formation flying requirements.

Folta, David↗

NASA NTRS2003

An Autonomous Control System for an Intra-Vehicular Spacecraft Mobile Monitor Prototype

This paper presents an overview of an ongoing research and development effort at the NASA Ames Research Center to create an autonomous control system for an internal spacecraft autonomous mobile monitor. It primary functions are to provide crew support and perform intra- vehicular sensing activities by autonomously navigating onboard the International Space Station. We describe the mission roles and high-level functional requirements for an autonomous mobile monitor. The mobile monitor prototypes, of which two are operational and one is actively being designed, physical test facilities used to perform ground testing, including a 3D micro-gravity test facility, and simulators are briefly described. We provide an overview of the autonomy framework and describe each of its components, including those used for automated planning, goal-oriented task execution, diagnosis, and fault recovery. A sample mission test scenario is also described.

Dorais, Gregory A.↗

NASA NTRS2003

A Survey of Space Robotics

In this paper we summarize a survey conducted by NASA to determine the state-of-the-art in space robotics and to predict future robotic capabilities under either nominal and intensive development effort. The space robotics assessment study examined both in-space operations including assembly, inspection, and maintenance and planetary surface operations like mobility and exploration. Applications of robotic autonomy and human-robot cooperation were considered. The study group devised a decomposition of robotic capabilities and then suggested metrics to specify the technical challenges associated with each. The conclusion of this paper identifies possible areas in which investment in space robotics could lead to significant advances of important technologies.

Space robotics survey↗

NASA NTRS1990

Environmental Control and Life Support System Evolution

The Space Station Freedom Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) will have to accommodate the changes to Freedom as it evolves over the design life of 30 years or more. Requirements will change as pressurized modules are added, crew numbers increase, and as the tasks to be performed change. This evolution will result in different demands on the ECLSS and the ECLSS wilt have to adapt. Technologies other than the baselined ones may be better able to perform the various tasks and technological advances will result in improved life support hardware having better performance, increased reliability, reduced power consumption, weight, and volume, greater autonomy, and fewer resupply requirements. A preliminary study was performed to look at alternative technologies for life support and evaluate them for their integration requirements, focusing on the fluid line interface requirements. (A follow-on study will expand greatly on the scope of this preliminary study.) The integration requirements of the alternative technologies may be different from those of the baselined technologies. If this is the case, then by designing the initial space station to have the necessary fluid lines, etc. required by the selected alternative technologies then the task of replacing the baselined ones will be greatly simplified, thereby reducing the cost in on-orbit time as well as dollars.

Wieland, Paul↗

NASA NTRS2003

Dynamically Reconfigurable Approach to Multidisciplinary Problems

The complexity and autonomy of the constituent disciplines and the diversity of the disciplinary data formats make the task of integrating simulations into a multidisciplinary design optimization problem extremely time-consuming and difficult. We propose a dynamically reconfigurable approach to MDO problem formulation wherein an appropriate implementation of the disciplinary information results in basic computational components that can be combined into different MDO problem formulations and solution algorithms, including hybrid strategies, with relative ease. The ability to re-use the computational components is due to the special structure of the MDO problem. We believe that this structure can and should be used to formulate and solve optimization problems in the multidisciplinary context. The present work identifies the basic computational components in several MDO problem formulations and examines the dynamically reconfigurable approach in the context of a popular class of optimization methods. We show that if the disciplinary sensitivity information is implemented in a modular fashion, the transfer of sensitivity information among the formulations under study is straightforward. This enables not only experimentation with a variety of problem formations in a research environment, but also the flexible use of formulations in a production design environment.

Alexandrov, Natalie M.↗

NASA NTRS2003

Simulation-Based Verification of Livingstone Applications

AI software is viewed as a means to give greater autonomy to automated systems, capable of coping with harsh and unpredictable environments in deep space missions. Autonomous systems pose a serious challenge to traditional test-based verification approaches, because of the enormous space of possible situations that they aim to address. Before these systems are put in control of critical applications, appropriate new verification approaches need to be developed. This article describes Livingstone PathFinder (LPF), a verification tool for autonomous diagnosis applications based on NASA's Livingstone model-based diagnosis system. LPF applies state space exploration algorithms to an instrumented testbed, consisting of the Livingstone diagnosis system embedded in a simulated operating environment. The article describes different facets of LPF and reports some experimental results from applying LPF to a Livingstone model of the main propulsion feed subsystem of the X-34 space vehicle. This paper describes Livingstone PathFinder (LPF), a verification tool for autonomous diagnosis applications based on NASA's Livingstone model-based diagnosis system. LPF applies state space exploration algorithms to an instrumented testbed, consisting of the Livingstone diagnosis system embedded in a simulated operating environment. Section 2 provides an overview of Livingstone; Section 3 describes the LPF architecture; Section 4 discusses its applicability; Section 5 reviews some experimental results; Section 6 compares LPF to related verification approaches; Section 7 draws conclusions and discusses some perspectives.

Lindsey, Anthony E.↗

NASA NTRS2003

Sensory Motor Coordination in Robonaut

As a participant of the year 2000 NASA Summer Faculty Fellowship Program, I worked with the engineers of the Dexterous Robotics Laboratory at NASA Johnson Space Center on the Robonaut project. The Robonaut is an articulated torso with two dexterous arms, left and right five-fingered hands, and a head with cameras mounted on an articulated neck. This advanced space robot, now driven only teleoperatively using VR gloves, sensors and helmets, is to be upgraded to a thinking system that can find, interact with and assist humans autonomously, allowing the Crew to work with Robonaut as a (junior) member of their team. Thus, the work performed this summer was toward the goal of enabling Robonaut to operate autonomously as an intelligent assistant to astronauts. Our underlying hypothesis is that a robot can develop intelligence if it learns a set of basic behaviors (i.e., reflexes - actions tightly coupled to sensing) and through experience learns how to sequence these to solve problems or to accomplish higher-level tasks. We describe our approach to the automatic acquisition of basic behaviors as learning sensory-motor coordination (SMC). Although research in the ontogenesis of animals development from the time of conception) supports the approach of learning SMC as the foundation for intelligent, autonomous behavior, we do not know whether it will prove viable for the development of autonomy in robots. The first step in testing the hypothesis is to determine if SMC can be learned by the robot. To do this, we have taken advantage of Robonaut's teleoperated control system. When a person teleoperates Robonaut, the person's own SMC causes the robot to act purposefully. If the sensory signals that the robot detects during teleoperation are recorded over several repetitions of the same task, it should be possible through signal analysis to identify the sensory-motor couplings that accompany purposeful motion. In this report, reasons for suspecting SMC as the basis for intelligent behavior will be reviewed. A robot control system for autonomous behavior that uses learned SMC will be proposed. Techniques for the extraction of salient parameters from sensory and motor data will be discussed. Experiments with Robonaut will be discussed and preliminary data presented.

Peters, Richard Alan, II↗

NASA NTRS2003

Obtaining the Greatest Scientific Benefit from Observational Platforms by Consideration of the Relative Benefit of Observations

One of the current trends in spacecraft software design is to increase the autonomy of onboard flight and science software. This is especially true when real-time observations may affect the observation schedule of a mission. For many science missions, such as those conducted by the Swift Burst Alert Telescope, the ability of the spacecraft to autonomously respond in real-time to unpredicted science events is crucial for mission success. We apply utility theory within resource management middleware to optimize the real-time performance of application software and achieve maximum system level benefit. We then explore how this methodology can be extended to manage both software and observational resources onboard a spacecraft to achieve the best possible observations.

Chelberg, David↗

NASA NTRS2003

Resource Management for Real-Time Adaptive Agents

Increased autonomy and automation in onboard flight systems offer numerous potential benefits, including cost reduction and greater flexibility. The existence of generic mechanisms for automation is critical for handling unanticipated science events and anomalies where limitations in traditional control software with fixed, predetermined algorithms can mean loss of science data and missed opportunities for observing important terrestrial events. We have developed such a mechanism by adding a Hierarchical Agent-based ReaLTime technology (HART) extension to our Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) middleware. Traditional DRM provides mechanisms to monitor the realtime performance of distributed applications and to move applications among processors to improve real-time performance. In the HART project we have designed and implemented a performance adaptation mechanism to improve reaktime performance. To use this mechanism, applications are developed that can run at various levels of quality. The DRM can choose a setting for the quality level of an application dynamically at run-time in order to manage satellite resource usage more effectively. A groundbased prototype of a satellite system that captures and processes images has also been developed as part of this project to be used as a benchmark for evaluating the resource management framework A significant enhancement of this generic mission-independent framework allows scientists to specify the utility, or "scientific benefit," of science observations under various conditions like cloud cover and compression method. The resource manager then uses these benefit tables to determine in redtime how to set the quality levels for applications to maximize overall system utility as defined by the scientists running the mission. We also show how maintenance functions llke health and safety data can be integrated into the utility framework. Once thls framework has been certified for missions and successfully flight tested it can be reused with little development overhead for other missions. In contrast, current space missions llke Swift manage similar types of resource trade -off completely with the scientific application code itself, and such code must be re-certified and tested for each mission even if a large portion of the code base is shared. This final report discusses some of the major issues motivating this research effort, provides a literature review of the related work, discusses the resource management framework and ground-based satellite system prototype that has been developed, indicates what work is yet to be performed, and provides a list of publications resulting from this work.

Welch, Lonnie↗

NASA NTRS2003

Cooperative Exploration of Rough Martian Terrains with the "Scorpion" Legged Robot as an Adjunct to a Rover.

NASA needs autonomous robotic exploration of difficult (rough and/or steep) scientifically interesting Martian terrains. Concepts involving distributed autonomy for cooperative robotic exploration are key to enabling new scientific objectives in robotic missions. We propose to utilize a legged robot as an adjunct scout to a rover for access to difficult - scientifically interesting - terrains (rocky areas, slopes, cliffs). Our final mission scenario involves the Ames rover platform "K9" and Scorpion acting together to explore a steep cliff, with the Scorpion robot rappelling down using the K9 as an anchor as well as mission planner and executive. Cooperation concepts, including wheeled rappelling robots have been proposed before. Now we propose to test the combined advantages of a wheeled vehicle with a legged scout as well as the advantages of merging of high level planning and execution with biologically inspired, behavior based robotics. We propose to use the 8-legged, multifunctional autonomous robot platform Scorpion that is currently capable of: Walking on different terrains (rocks, sand, grass, ...). Perceiving its environment and modifying its behavioral pattern accordingly. These capabilities would be extended to enable the Scorpion to: communicate and cooperate with a partner robot; climb over rocks, rubble piles, and objects with structural features. This will be done in the context of exploration of rough terrains in the neighborhood of the rover, but inaccessible to it, culminating in the added capability of rappelling down a steep cliff for both vertical and horizontal terrain observation.

Colombano, Silvano P.↗