Abstract: A Hybrid Procedural/Deductive Executive For Autonomous Spacecraft

Barney Pell, Ed Gamble, Erann Gat, Ron Keesing, Jim Kurien, Bill Millar, P. Pandurang Nayak, Christian Plaunt, and Brian Williams.

Appears in the Working Notes of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Model-Directed Autonomous Systems, Cambridge, MA, 1997.

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 reasoning system. The resulting system 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.

Last updated September 17, 1997. Direct feedback to Barney Pell (pell@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov)