Intelligent Agents for Exploration Systems
Justin W. Thomas · 2006
Recent NASA missions (Deep Space One, Earth Observing One, and the Mars Exploration Rovers) successfully demonstrate intelligent agent technologies for autonomous control and optimized science observations. The Exploration program will require interactions between humans and intelligent agents for distributed missions operations and human-robotic collaborative tasks. NASA’s focus will shift towards distributed groups of interacting agents, or multi-agent systems. This paper introduces intelligent agents, offers a brief survey of applicable technologies, discusses challenges in the human spaceflight environment, and presents potential applications of agent technology for the Exploration program. Discussion of past and present NASA intelligent agent projects includes United Space Alliance’s work on ground-based International Space Station health management and decision support.