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.
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Pell, B., Gamble, E.B., Gat, E. et al. A Hybrid Procedural/Deductive Executive for Autonomous Spacecraft. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2, 7–22 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010018821724
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010018821724