A Hybrid Procedural/Deductive Executive for Autonomous Spacecraft

  • Authors:

  • Barney Pell;Edward B. Gamble;Erann Gat;Ron Keesing;James Kurien;William Millar;Christian Plaunt;Brian C. Williams

  • Affiliations:

  • RIACS, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035 pell@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov;Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109 ed.gamble@jpl.naza.gov;Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109 gat@jpl.nasa.gov;Caelum Research, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035 keesing@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov;NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035 kurien@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov;Caelum Research, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035 millar@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov;Caelum Research, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035 plaunt@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov;NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269/2, Moffett Field, CA 94035 williams@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

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 recovery 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.