Presented by:
Walt Truszkowski, Harold (Lou) L. Hallock, Christopher Rouff, Jay Karlin, James Rash,
Mike Hinchey, Roy Sterritt
POSTPONED
Building 3 Auditorium
Abstract:
Autonomous and Autonomic Space Exploration Systems
Over the years, NASA missions have been gradually enhanced through ever greater autonomy of flight and ground systems to increase the amount of science data returned from missions, perform new science, and reduce mission costs. Autonomous and autonomic behaviors of spacecraft have steadily progressed, but must be extended further to enable success of the most advanced un-crewed space-mission concepts in the future.
In the early 1990s, the speakers (as well as others) began researching artificial intelligence techniques for application to ground control systems and spacecraft. The research initially developed and experimented with expert systems to automate ground system software and reduce the number of people needed to control a spacecraft. Subsequent research pursued agent-based technologies and autonomic systems concepts directed towards enhancing future space-mission self-management and survivability in harsh operational environments.
The results of this research, described in a recently published book, will be discussed with a NASA Goddard perspective in the talk. Material will be presented concerning not only the evolution of flight and ground autonomy, but also the technologies for developing autonomic systems, agent-based autonomy, cooperative autonomy, constellation missions, and swarm missions.
Biographies:
Walt Truszkowski received an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, USA, and the B.A. degree in Mathematics from Loyola College, USA. He is currently part of the NASA Emeritus Program where he is continuing his research in autonomous systems and knowledge-based systems. Previously he was a Senior Technologist in the Advanced Architectures and Automation Branch located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is the author of more than 30 technical papers and book chapters, and has edited 4 books in addition to the book that is the subject of this talk. His current research interests are in the areas of formal methods, agent/multi-agent systems, swarm technologies, evolutionary robotics, autonomic computing and the semantic web. Mr. Truszkowski is a Member of the IEEE, ACM, AAAI and the AIAA where he serves on the Technical Committee for Autonomous Systems.
Lou Hallock has a Ph.D., in Theoretical Physics, a M.S. in physics and a B.S. in Physics all from the University of Maryland. Dr. Hallock has been at NASA Goddard since 1990 in the Flight Software branch. His primary area of expertise is in GN&C flight software. Missions that he has worked on include the Hubble Space Telescope, RXTE, JWST, WMAP, Triana, ST-5, SDO, LRO, GPM, Constellation, and LISA. He is a member of APS, AIAA, and AAS.
Dr. Christopher Rouff is a Manager at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 1991. His research interests include swarm-based and complex adaptive systems, agent-based systems, verification of complex software systems, and communication of information between computing systems. At Lockheed Development he is evaluating current research and new technologies for further research and development. Before joining Lockheed Martin Dr. Rouff was a Senior Scientist with SAIC doing research and development in multi-agent systems, verification of intelligent systems, software testing and robotics. Previously he was with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for nine years where he researched cooperative multi-agent systems for ground and spaceflight applications, verification of multi-agent systems and led a number of software research and development projects. Dr. Rouff has over one hundred publications in swarm, agent and software engineering related areas and over twenty-five years of experience in software engineering and intelligent systems.
In Systems work Jay Karlin has enjoyed a lifetime of exploration across a spectrum of science fields by discovering common threads and employing their underlying mechanisms. For example, in the life sciences, the animal nervous system provided the basis for systems control via the exploitation of its adaptive-ness. A teacher of his, Stafford Beer, developed a managerial business control infrastructure by mapping it to the human nervous system. Crossing the bridge between mechanics and information technology, he saw how physics i.e., mechanics, through its mathematics, enables human affairs to be traced by the architect’s cursor. Beer mapped a Viable System Model followed by governments around the world today in their economic governance structures. John Zachman develops his houses architecture showing outside-to-inside traffic flows as driver of its primary layout. Beer in his model identifies this as the external environment of the business. They all come together. Jay’s post grad education and entire career in IT in engineering has been developing models both of the physics and the mathematics of complex systems. That is how he has meshed together with our team of authors.
Trained as a mathematician, Mr. Rash joined NASA/GSFC in 1985. In his career at Goddard, he pursued analysis of RF space communications, developed a prototype for a space-mission communications-scheduling system based on evolutionary programming, and worked to develop artificial intelligence technologies applicable to space missions. He initiated and managed the long-term Operating Missions as Nodes on the Internet (OMNI) Project, which successfully demonstrated concepts and technologies for using standard Internet protocols for space communications. For some 15 years, he pursued formal methods as a means to enable cost-effective development of high reliability systems, and was co-inventor on several related NASA patents. He retired at the end of 2008, joining the NASA Emeritus Program, where he continues to pursue related technologies. During his career, he participated in organizing numerous conferences on artificial intelligence, space communications, and formal methods, and authored or co-authored over 80 publications, including conference and journal papers and books and book chapters.
Michael Hinchey is the Director of the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre Lero, Unviersity of Limerick, Ireland. Mike studied at the University of Limerick as an undergraduate, Oxford Univeristy for his MSc and Cambridge University for his Ph.D. Mike has been a promulgator of formal methods throughout his career, especially CSP and the Z notation. He was previously the Director of the Software Engineering Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and is the founding editor-in-chief of the NASA journal Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, launched in 2005. He has held numerous visiting professorships both visiting and permanent, in a number of universities including the University of Nebraska, Queen’s University Belfast, New Jersey Institute of Technology (Assistant Professor), and the Skövde University College in Sweden and was at Loyola College in Maryland, before his current post. He is a Fellow of the IET, a Fellow of the IMA, and a Senior Member of the IEEE.
Roy Sterritt is a member of Faculty at Computing and Engineering in the University of Ulster. He spent several years in industry with IBM, first at their UK headquarters in Portsmouth, and then at the IBM Hursley Labs in Winchester. Initially he was a Software Developer but then became a Product Development Manager with responsibility for tools to support risk assessment and project management in personal and mobile environments which were used widely in the UK and US. Roy’s academic research career began in 1996 when he was appointed to the first of a series of joint University of Ulster and Nortel research projects investigating parallel, automated and intelligent approaches to the development and testing of fault management telecommunications systems. Roy’s main focus of research is Systems and Software Engineering of Autonomic Systems. He has 175+ publications in the field including research collaborations with NASA, IBM TJ Watson Center, BT, SAP, HP and Core Systems as well as many academic partners. He is the founding chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Autonomous & Autonomic Systems and elected chair (2009-2011) of IEEE Technical Committee on Engineering of Computer-Based Systems (TCECBS). He has been appointed to the many editorial boards including the NASA Journal on Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, AIAA Journal of Aerospace Computing, Information, and Communication, Journal of Autonomic and Trusted Computing, and Multiagent and Grid Systems - An International Journal.