Artificial Intelligence: Powering Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars
Jeremy Frank · ASCEND 2020 · 2020
The NASA Autonomous Systems and Operations (ASO) project has developed and demonstrated numerous autonomy enabling technologies employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. Our work has employed AI in three distinct ways to enable autonomous mission operations capabilities. Crew Autonomy gives astronauts tools to operate space vehicles or systems without assistance from Mission Control. Vehicle System Management uses AI techniques to turn the astronaut’s spacecraft into a robot, allowing it to operate when astronauts are not present, or to reduce astronaut workload. AI technology also enables Autonomous Robots to act as crew assistants or proxies when the crew are not present. In this paper, we first describe human spaceflight mission operations functions, and classify these functions as monitoring, planning, plan execution, and fault management. We describe the wide range of development and demonstration activities performed by ASO since 2011. We describe the AI techniques behind each of these demonstrations, which include a variety of symbolic automated reasoning and machine learning based approaches. Finally, we conclude with an assessment of these demonstrations, motivating future development needs for AI to enable NASA’s future Exploration missions.