"The Remote Agent and Beyond"

3/30/2001: [time not recorded]
[location not recorded]

Abstract: As NASA enters the new millennium, the scope of space science and the boundaries of exploration have been pushed tremendously. New missions are rapidly being proposed where round-trip light time and operational difficulties prohibit traditional commanding methods. For instance, NASA's proposed Europa (a Jovian moon) submersible mission requires a spacecraft to land and burrow through miles of what are thought to be ice formations to locate potential life sources around underground volcanic vents. Such a proposed mission cannot be executed currently without more on-board autonomy which place the sense-plan-act loop on a spacecraft in a hostile environment with little observability from ground based controllers. Yet, another paradigm the agency is pushing is on robotic fleets of explorers cooperatively engaged in science either in planet-finding using interferometry for instance, or for "now-casting" weather information for earth. Controlling such large fleets in a systematic and consistent manner within the current climate of fiscal conservativeness, requires more autonomy, on-board and/or on the ground. Autonomy is therefore a central tenant at NASA and new funding efforts prove that the agency is serious about deploying missions where the control loop is closed on-board. The talk will describe the first closed loop on-board autonomy endeavor in space, when the Remote Agent a complex Artificial Intelligence based system controlled NASA's Deep Space One spacecraft. The talk will give an overview of the work with emphasis on a new paradigm on Constraint based Planning techniques for generative planning. We will describe the nature of the planning process and why such a paradigm has been successful despite skepticism from the AI planning community. We will also describe how this foundational work is being branched off for other NASA missions including a proposed ground-based sequencing engine for the most complex NASA mission yet, the Mars 03 Exploration Rovers. We will also describe proposed efforts with Milind Tambe (ISI) on a Distributed Remote Agent being proposed for a NASA testbed.

About Kanna Rajan: Kanna Rajan is a Senior Research Scientist and Group Lead for Spacecraft Autonomy at the Autonomy and Robotics Area at NASA Ames Research Center. He is one of the principals of the Remote Agent (RA) team which designed, built, tested and flew the first AI based closed-loop control system on a spacecraft. The RA was the co-winner of NASA's 1999 Software of the Year award, the agency's highest technical award. His interests are in in Planning/Scheduling, modeling and representation for real world planners. He is the team lead for the Ames Mars03 MER Sequencing project. Prior to joining Ames, he was in the doctoral program at the Courant Institute of Math Sciences at New York Univ. and at the Knowledge Systems group at American Airlines, helping build a Maintenance Routing scheduler which continues to be used by the airline 365 days of the year.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006