Abstract: Designed for Autonomy: Remote Agent for the New Millennium Program

Douglas E. Bernard and Barney Pell.

Appears in the Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space (i-SAIRAS), 1997.

This paper describes a new approach to spacecraft commanding and control, called the Remote Agent. In the Remote Agent approach, the operational rules and constraints are encoded in the flight software, and the software may be considered to be an autonomous "remote agent" of the spacecraft operators in the sense that the operators rely on the agent to achieve particular goals. The operators do not tell the agent exactly what to do at each instant of time. Instead, they tell the agent exactly which goals they want achieved in a period of time and how and when to report in. Missions of NASA's New Millennium Program will mark the first use of remote agent technologies to autonomously manage spacecraft in flight. The Remote Agent technology is one of the highest priorities for validation and is targeted for flight on the first New Millennium Mission, Deep Space One, anticipated to be launched in July, 1998.