An Autonomous Spacecraft Agent Prototype

  • Authors:

  • Barney Pell;Douglas E. Bernard;Steve A. Chien;Erann Gat;Nicola Muscettola;P. Pandurang Nayak;Michael D. Wagner;Brian C. Williams

  • Affiliations:

  • Caelum Research Corporation, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035. E-mail: pell@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov;Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109.;Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109.;Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109.;Recom Technologies, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035.;Recom Technologies, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035.;Fourth Planet Inc., 220 Main Street, Suite 204, Los Altos, CA 94022. E-mail: mwagner@4thplanet.com;NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035. E-mail: williams@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Robots - Special issue on autonomous agents
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

This paper describes the New Millennium Remote Agent (NMRA) architecture for autonomous spacecraft control systems. The architecturesupports challenging requirements of the autonomous spacecraft domain notusually addressed in mobile robot architectures, including highly reliableautonomous operations over extended time periods in the presence of tightresource constraints, hard deadlines, limited observability, and concurrentactivity. A hybrid architecture, NMRA integrates traditional real-timemonitoring and control with heterogeneous components for constraint-basedplanning and scheduling, robust multi-threaded execution, and model-baseddiagnosis and reconfiguration. Novel features of this integratedarchitecture include support for robust closed-loop generation and executionof concurrent temporal plans and a hybrid procedural/deductive executive.We implemented a prototype autonomous spacecraft agent within thearchitecture and successfully demonstrated the prototype in the context of achallenging autonomous mission scenario on a simulated spacecraft. As aresult of this success, the integrated architecture has been selected to flyas an autonomy experiment on Deep Space One (DS-1), the first flight ofNASA‘s New Millennium Program (NMP), which will launch in 1998. It will bethe first AI system to autonomously control an actual spacecraft.