In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, ACM Press, 1997.

This paper describes the New Millennium Remote Agent (NMRA) architecture for autonomous spacecraft control systems. This architecture integrates traditional real-time monitoring and control with constraint-based planning and scheduling, robust multi-threaded execution, and model-based diagnosis and reconfiguration. We implemented a prototype autonomous spacecraft agent within the architecture and demonstrated the prototype in the context of a challenging autonomous mission scenario on a simulated spacecraft. As a result of this success, the integrated architecture has been selected to control Deep Space One (DS-1), the first flight of NASA's New Millennium Program (NMP), which will launch in 1998. It will be the first AI system to autonomously control an actual spacecraft.