NOVEMBER 2005:
Automated Flight Planner Presented to Steering Committee:
The SOFIA Science Steering Committee (SSSC) meets biennially to review technical progress and science tradeoffs, recommend standards, and represent the science community's interests in the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). At this year's Oct. 17 meeting, the SOFIA Automated Flight Planner (AFP) team presented an overview of current AFP functionality, the integration strategy, and performance on a representative "wish list" of science plans. The presentation was well received.
OCTOBER 2005:
NASA Quest Webcast:
Bill Clancey (Code TI) and Jennifer Heldmann (Code SS) appeared with Lassen National Park ranger Steve Zachary in a "Living and Working on Mars" NASA Quest Challenge webcast on Oct. 12, 2005, available to more than 2,250 registered students (grades 5-8) in 25 U.S. states and six other countries. Clancey explained how fieldwork studies and Ames' Mobile Agents architecture can support space exploration.
Intelligent Systems Technologies Demonstrated:
The Collaborative Decision Systems (CDS) milestone demonstration on Sep. 29-30, 2005, brought together technologies initially funded by NASA's Intelligent Systems Project under CICT and now SISM, including Multi-Target Single Cycle Instrument Placement; the distributed Mobile Agents Architecture; Intelligent Deployable Execution Agents (IDEA) frameworks; and the EUROPA 2 constraint-based planning and decision making framework, related to MAPGEN and its Constraint Editor, as well as component modeling, fault detection and management, speech recognition, dialogue understanding, mobile communications, remote situation visualization, and workflow analysis.
Wireless Network for Video Monitoring:
Roberto Manduchi at UCSC is developing a "Meerkats" wide-area wireless network of visual sensors for long-term environmental monitoring. (Uses for such power-aware and bandwidth-aware networks range from ecosystem studies to monitoring of dust devils on Mars.) Manduchi has implemented a simple Web-based protocol to transmit and render the video stream, and is conducting high-data rate power benchmarking. His team has ported both AODV and DSR wireless protocols to Meerkats nodes, successfully testing them in single-hop and multi-hop scenarios. Data throughput reached six frames per second, for video frames of 320x240 pixels.
Mars Robot Demonstration at Ames:
Ames robots K9 and Gromit showed off their mixed-initiative autonomy software for the press on Oct. 3, 2005. K9 picked its way through a rock-strewn field at four inches per second, with half-minute pauses to decide how to proceed. It took pictures of rocks along the way, and can place instruments against rocks designated for drilling or micro-imaging. Another robot -- a squat all-terrain vehicle named Gromit -- used Mobile Agents software and NASA-developed dialogue understanding to coordinate with a human field team, simulating robot-assisted geological exploration on Mars.
Subvocal Speech Milestone:
Chuck Jorgensen's real-time subvocal speech project achieved a primary FY05 research milestone on Aug. 29, with better than 70% average recognition in a generalization test set containing 15 different words. The development goal is a new computer interfacing modality for immersed human/machine systems, capable of delivering hands-free, noise-immune communication under mission conditions where acoustic communications are difficult. Subvocal speech has also drawn interest from emergency response communities, and was profiled on Japan's NHK television network.
New Mission Control Technologies:
Distributed ground data systems and mission operation systems will require custom user interfaces supported by an interoperable communication framework. The Mission Control Technologies (MCT) project at Ames demonstrated such an MCT system -- developed in collaboration with JPL's Deep Space Mission Systems Accountability service -- at JPL on Sep. 29.
Sliding Autonomy Performs Well:
Sanjiv Singh of CMU has completed several tests of "sliding autonomy" in a robot construction task. In a four-beam assembly task, sporadic intervention maintained the efficiency of autonomous operation with an increase in reliability proportional to the human's involvement. Reported operator workload was significantly less than during full teleoperation, at only a slight penalty in reliability. Other experiments clarified the type, amount, and viewpoint of video that best helps the user understand the assembly action.
Mobile Agents in DesertRATS 05:
Researchers from Ames participated in the two-week 2005 Desert Research and Technology Studies (DesertRATS 05) field test at Meteor Crater South Rim and West Flank (near Flagstaff, AZ. The goal was to test two planetary space suits -- the first such exercise since Apollo tests -- and a robot vehicle capable of carrying suited subjects. Ames provided EVITA (EVA Intelligent Talking Assistant) and Mobile Agent voice commanding of the "Boudreaux" EVA Robotic Assistant (ERA), which could follow a suited subject or go to a named location and take a panoramic picture. Teams also used speech control of head-mounted displays, work flow management, and voice notes.
SEPTEMBER 2005:
MARTE Drilling Simulation Completed:
The Mars Astrobiology Research and Technology Experiment (MARTE) is completing a month-long simulation of a Mars drilling mission. The robotic platform for drilling, sample handling, and life detection was deployed in late August to an old mine site near Rio Tinto in southwestern Spain. Remote science teams in Spain and in the US have been analyzing data and directing daily operations through a remote-operations user interface.
Ames Intelligent Robot Demonstration:
NASA Ames will conduct a "Marscape" mobile agents demonstration on Oct. 3, open to the press. Two prototype space robots -- K9 and Gromit -- will interact with humans simulating a field geology mission on Mars. K9 is Ames' advanced rover prototype, and Gromit is an RWI (Real World Interface) ATRV Junior all-terrain robot vehicle. Next-generation planning/execution software gives the vehicles sophisticated reasoning abilities, including obstacle avoidance and autonomous navigation through initially unknown rough terrain (while monitoring events along the way). Researchers playing the role of astronauts will use voice-commanded software agents and a distributed communication system to direct and coordinate robot activities.
Decision-Theoretic Contingency Planning:
A task supervised by Nicolas Meuleau is extending our capability for rover or spacecraft contingency planning in stochastic domains with continuous resources (e.g., time and energy) and large numbers of goals. Piecewise-constant and piecewise-linear approximations to dynamic programming -- plus a a new "Hybrid AO*" heuristic search algorithm -- permit use of decision theoretic approaches. The C++ code has been validated on models of the K9 rover.
Mars Society Presentation by Clancey:
Bill Clancey gave an invited plenary presentation at the 8th annual International Mars Society Convention. His talk on "The Mobile Agents 2005 Field Test: Planning for Exploration" described the current Mobile Agents Architecture configuration of more than 60 agents, including six voice-commanded robots (JSC's Boudreaux, Thibodeaux, and Scout, and Ames' PER, Gromit, and K9). Rotation 38 at the Mars Society's Desert Research Station (MDRS, April 2-17) was completely dedicated to a field test of the communications architecture.
AUGUST 2005:
Clarissa Wins SpeechTEK Big Bang Award:
NASA and Nuance Communications, Inc. were awarded Speech Technology Magazine's prestigious Big Bang Speech Solutions Award -- for the most impactful speech deployment in the past 12 months -- at the 11th annual SpeechTEK Exposition and Educational Conference. The award was for the Clarissa Procedure Navigator, a fully voice-operated procedure browser that will enable astronauts to be more efficient with their hands and eyes as they execute scripted procedures. The software was first tested in space by Expedition 11 Science Officer and Flight Engineer John Phillips on June 27, 2005.
MARTE Managers Win Ames Honor Award:
NASA Ames will give Howard Cannon and Steve Dunagan a 2005 Ames Honor Award on Sep. 1, 2005, in recognition of their work on the Mars Astrobiology Research and Technology Experiment (MARTE). The MARTE team has deployed a robotic drilling and life-detection platform in the Rio Tinto, Spain, to simulate a Mars drilling mission. Cannon managed the automated drilling software and operations, while Dungan managed the field deployment, science approach, and hardware interfaces. The experiment has already discovered a new type of subsurface biosphere, resulting in a paper submitted to Nature.
Subvocal Speech is Saatchi Finalist:
Ames researcher Chuck Jorgensen has been selected as a finalist for the biennial 2005 Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas -- and its $100,000 prize -- for his work on subvocal speech recognition. Subvocal technology uses electromyographic (EMG) signals to the tongue and vocal cords, without requiring actual speech. This is particularly suited to flight operations, underwater communication, instrument and computer commanding (even in the presence of fan noise), and wheelchair control.
NASA Quest Challenge Support:
Bill Clancey is helping Liza Coe and the Ames Education Technology Team implement a "Living and Working on Mars" NASA Quest Challenge. This year's challenge -- the first using field observations with collaborating NASA scientists -- will study red snowpack algae at Lassen National Park. Students in grades 5-8 will suggest systems that could support such a study on Mars, and will then interact with scientists in a webcast.
Ames' David E. Smith Honored by AAAI:
Ames Researcher David E. Smith has been recognized as a 2005 Fellow by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), for significant contributions to automated planning (including contingent, conformant, and temporal planning). Dr. Smith leads the Planning and Scheduling Group in Ames' Intelligent Systems Division, Autonomy and Robotics Area.
JULY 2005:
Publication of Stochastic Inference Method:
Vadim Smelyanskiy's work in dynamical inference of cardiovascular-respiratory models has been accepted for publication in Physical Review E as "Nonlinear statistical modeling and model discovery for cardiorespiratory data" with D.G. Luchinsky and M.M. Millonas. The spectral banding technique will be used with a wireless system for non-invasive pilot or astronaut cardiac monitoring. Typical data include 2-lead bipolar electrocardiograms (ECG), blood pressure, respiration, pulse oximetry, and G-force vector time series.
Rover Models for Anomaly Resolution:
Future robotic explorers will be highly capable, but operating in complex, uncertain environments that offer no universal safe mode when problems arise. Tony Barrett is increasing execution robustness for such robots and their communicating support agents, via real-time optimal planning for anomaly resolution. He has completed an initial model of FIDO rover behaviors from the FIDO command dictionary.
Intelligent Instrument Calibration:
Scientific instruments with built-in calibration and signal processing can minimize support costs while increase science return. Kevin Knuth has been developing such capabilities for the United States Naval Observatory dispersed Fourier Transform Spectrometer (dFTS) at the Clay Center Observatory in Boston. In February, a team at USNO in Washington, DC, achieved manual remote alignment of the dFTS over the Internet. Alignment took five minutes, whereas past procedures -- requiring opening of the instrument's thermal protection -- took hours. The calibration process will be fully automated by Sep. 2005.
Mixed-Initiative Planning Workshop:
John Bresina (ARC) and his collaborator Karen Myers (SRI International) helped organize a workshop on Mixed-Initiative Planning and Scheduling at the 15th Int'l Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Bresina gave the workshop's featured presentation, "Mixed-Initiative Planning in MAPGEN: Capabilities and Shortcomings," describing recent temporal preference enhancements to meet needs of MER task activity planners (TAPs) in daily science planning.
EUROPA 2 Planner Demonstrated:
Two NASA planning technologies were demonstrated at the 15th Int'l Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (http://icaps05.icaps-conference.org/). Michael Iatauro demonstrated EUROPA 2, a component-based software library for reasoning with resource-limited plans and schedules. It also includes PlanWorks, a constraint-based visualization environment for plans and partial plans, which Jeremy Frank presented in the conference's 1st Int'l Competition on Knowledge Engineering (KE) for Planning and Scheduling.
JUNE 2005:
Voice Recognition Tested in Space:
Clarissa, a voice-enabled procedure browser developed at NASA Ames, was successfully tested by astronaut John Phillips on board the International Space Station, on June 27, 2005. Clarissa Project leader Beth Ann Hockey believes this is the first-ever use of a spoken dialogue system in space. The software accepts 75 commands for navigating checklists, based on a vocabulary of 260 words.
Modular Robot Reliability Studies:
John Dolan of CMU has implemented a Matlab-based graphical user interface for studying reliability of robot module configurations under varying assumptions about temperature, load, and repairability. One study of serial (replacement) and parallel module reliability focused on survival of at least two robots at the end of a traverse. For reasonable mean time to failure (MTTF) values and an estimated 90% success rate for module replacement, two repairable robots with one spare module survived better than three non-repairable robots. Two robots with two spare modules were nearly as good as four non-repairable robots.
Improvements in Distributed Collaboration:
Crew time and attention are scarce and costly resources. Software "liaison agents" can reduce workload safely during joint human-automation procedures, automating routine tasks and eliminating interruptions, distractions, and sources of error. Debbie Schreckenghost (Metrica) has been building such an information/communication system within JSC's Distributed Collaboration and Interaction (DCI) agent environment. This approach to adjustable autonomy builds up from fully manual systems, rather than down from full autonomy. Maintaining operational context when the agent is only occasionally in control is one of the research challenges.
PIM Distributed-Control Implementation:
Future missions will require coordinated action by rovers, robots, or other semi-autonomous agents. Ken Ford at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) is developing a novel control architecture -- called a Process-Integrated Mechanism (PIM) -- where asynchronous agents are viewed as parts of a single, integrated mechanism with a control process that is passed from agent to agent. Ford has now demonstrated the PIM concept on an AromaVM system in a multi-robot control application with distributed sensor information fusion.
Self-Healing Analog Controllers:
Behavior of a system will degrade or fail when there are changes in the environment, plant, or controller. David Gwaltney (MSFC) and Michael Ferguson (JPL) are developing self-healing analog controllers that compensate for such changes for more robustness than conventional dual redundant (Fail-operational/Fail-safe) designs. When a fault is detected, the online controller uses genetic search to develop a new configuration able to approximate desired behavior.
Evolutionary Recovery from Failures:
When robotic systems encounter unexpected difficulties or damage, physical testing of possible solutions may be risky. Hod Lipson (Cornell) and Gregory Hornby (NASA Ames Evolvable Systems Group) are developing automated diagnosis and recovery approaches that may achieve an order-of-magnitude reduction in physical testing over current evolutionary methods. Their algorithm co-evolves candidate diagnostic models and recovery actions, either continuously or when a fault is detected.
Procedure Learning Study:
Training methods can influence astronaut or pilot success in learning procedures and generalizing to flexible skills for novel circumstances. Experienced users often find shortcuts to well-practiced procedures, and are often able to repair errors made during execution. John Anderson of CMU is modeling human performance of standard procedures in a Boeing 777 Flight Management System simulation, including prediction and analysis of shortcuts and repairs.
Human-Robot Performance Prediction:
Automated modeling and planning for human-robot teams requires a language for representing both human and robotic activities. Alonso Vera has done this with a Human Activity Dictionary (HAD) related to MER '03 rover performance parameters. Vera has also developed the Expert-Performance Research Toolkit (X-PRT), an interface that supports modeling for automated reasoning. This work will help predict human performance at monitoring and control tasks, guiding interface design for optimal speed or accuracy.
Oscillatory Hierarchy for Attention:
Kevin Knuth and PI Len Trejo have been studying attentional aspects of brain response to stimuli, to monitor pilot/astronaut attentional states and create more effective brain-computer interfaces. For this, Knuth developed a suite of source-separation algorithms for characterizing oscillatory bursts in EEG data. Work with NIH/NLM-funded collaborators has shown that attention modulates oscillatory activity in a hierarchical manner, driving gamma oscillations at a particular phase of theta oscillations and delta oscillations (0.1-3 Hz). Times of highest cortical responsiveness can thus be identified.
MAPGEN Planner Improvements:
John Bresina's team has enhanced the MAPGEN automated planner used in daily MER science planning. The new system lets a task activity planner (TAP) enter temporal preferences (via MAPGEN's Constraint Editor) and desired solution characteristics for the mixed-initiative reasoner to consider, instead of requiring the TAP to experiment with different time ranges for actions.
Kirk Rover Executive Improved:
The Kirk Model-based Executive unifies activity planning and path planning for autonomous rover navigation of difficult terrains. PI Brian Williams of MIT says this elevates the level of commanding to goal states, goal locations, and contingencies, which may significantly reduce down time of rover missions. A recent advance is the benchmarking and integration of an incremental temporal consistency capability.
Mixed-Initiative Multi-Robot Coordination:
Construction of large orbital structures will most likely require human supervision of teams of robots. Multi-robot coordination research by Sanjiv Singh of CMU has advanced from single-beam docking in fixed supports to building a structure of four beams with four floating nodes. Three robots (RoboCrane, Mobile Manipulator, and Roving Eye) must cooperate to complete the task.
MAY 2005:
Award Nomination for Subvocal Speech:
Subvocal technology directly taps electromyographic (EMG) signals produced by larynx and tongue muscles as words are pronounced or silently mouthed, hence is immune to noise and many common impediments to vocal speech. Users might include astronauts (suited or in the presence of fan noise), firefighter and disaster assistance response team (DART) members operating in high noise and/or pressurized suit environments, SCUBA divers (e.g., for training in the Neutral Buoyancy Facility at JSC), operations management personnel, and injured or disabled people.
Mission Simulation Toolkit Update:
The NASA Ames Mission Simulation Facility (MSF) team under Greg Pisanich has released Version 1.0b of its Mission Simulation Toolkit (MST) to the Ames Open Source repository. MST supports development of autonomy technology for planetary exploration vehicles, from early concept studies through the evaluation of mature technology. The toolkit provides a software testbed with simulated robotic platforms, sensors, and environments. Modules include rover power management, navigation, terrain interaction dynamics, and rock detection, in addition to a command executive, logger, debugger, and 3-D display.
Planning with Continuous Resources:
Spacecraft and rovers for planetary exploration must react intelligently to unpredicted situations -- possibly over long periods of time -- despite uncertainty about environment, state, and the duration, energy consumption, and outcome of their actions. Nicolas Meuleau is extending our capability for near-optimal contingency planning in concurrent, oversubscribed domains with continuous resources (e.g., time, energy, memory). His piecewise-constant and piecewise-linear approximations to utility functions for dynamic programming have been implemented in a C++ library.
Helicopter Society Award for ARP:
The American Helicopter Society's San Francisco Bay Area Chapter has given its annual Schroers Award for Outstanding Rotorcraft Research to the Army/NASA Autonomous Rotorcraft Project (ARP) team. ARP is a collaborative effort to produce a versatile, autonomous sensor platform for complex, airborne observation missions. The team has addressed platform integration/reconfigurability, sensor-driven obstacle avoidance, and mission-level autonomy for intelligent periodic surveillance of multiple targets.
Livingstone on Earth Observing-1 Award:
In recognition of their outstanding work on the Livingstone EO-1 Diagnosis Infusion Experiment, the Livingstone on Earth Observing One Team will receive the NASA Honor Award for Group Achievement. Sandra Hayden's team uploaded the Livingstone 2 model-based diagnostic engine to EO-1 (launched in 2000) and began testing in late April. Livingstone has run flawlessly on-board EO-1, monitoring and diagnosing the EO-1 imaging sequence with no false positives. This is a new record for model-based diagnostic software in space.
TOPS Ecological Forecasting System:
Rama Nemani presented an overview of the Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System (TOPS) at the NASA Ecological Modeling Workshop in Asilomar, CA, to modelers in the fields of ecological forecasting, invasive species, and human health. NASA HQ hosted the workshop, along with the Center for Health Applications of Aerospace Related Technologies (at NASA Ames). Nemani and Forrest Melton also met with representatives of the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey to discuss use of the integrated TOPS-Planner system to provide daily information on ecosystem conditions, as decision support for managers of national parks in California. And Nemani presented a fire model to the USFS Fire Lab.
Human-Robot Interactions Field Test:
The Mobile Agent architecture and collaborative engineering methodology (based on Brahms) provides a flexible toolkit for configuring extravehicular activity (EVA) components, visualizing and formalizing EVA plans, and automating key supervisory functions. The Mars Society's Desert Research Station (MDRS) Rotation 38, April 3-17, 2005, provided an excellent, cost-effective venue for field testing NASA's Mobile Agents EVA communications system, which features automated workflow between crew and robots; field-activity data management; and alerting and advising for scheduling, navigation, and life support. Bill Clancey lead teams from JSC and Ames in an intensive two weeks of system integration, developing human-robot operations concepts and requirements while doing authentic geology exploration in a Mars analog environment.
Semi-Supervised Kernel-based Learning:
Labeling of spatial data (such as sensor maps) is an important machine learning goal for both scientific exploration and earth monitoring. Upender Kaul has developed a methodology for extending areas of known or stable label types into neighboring spatial regions. The method avoids turbulent behavior in transition regions, helping to produce a realistic and comprehensible regression fit or label map. Small amounts of training data can thus be used to model and analyze large amounts of spatial data. This technique is being applied to MODIS data over the visible-to-infrared range.
Stochastic Dynamic Model Inference:
Inference of multi-component dynamical models with hidden variables enables better management of large, occasional fluctuations in dynamic systems. Vadim Smelyanskiy has been studying inference of a nonlinear stochastic model for cardiovascular-respiratory functioning, for non-invasive cardiac monitoring of astronauts and pilots. Colleagues have used the same spectral banding approach to model climate effects on dynamical self-regulating food webs (and their possible collapse). Other rare phenomena, such as flooding and fire events, can also be modeled and forecast.
MaxEnt 2005 Workshop:
NASA Ames is co-sponsoring the 25th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering (Aug. 7-12 at SJSU, http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/maxent2005/). MaxEnt 2005 will cover all aspects of probabilistic inference and information theory, including recent explorations in Markov chain Monte Carlo and model selection techniques. Application areas include inference and inquiry algorithms in astronomy and astrophysics, geophysics, medical imaging, source separation, particle physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, earth science, and robotics.
APRIL 2005:
Clarissa in the News:
Clarissa is a speech recognition package that helps astronauts step through checklist procedures. Clarissa development has focused on potable water analysis and space suit check-ups.) USA Today's Science & Space web page (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-04-13-clarissa-iss_x.htm) for Apr. 13, 2005, carried an article on Clarissa written by Bjorn Carey of SPACE.com. The article noted that Clarissa is on each ISS client laptop, but that higher priority activities have delayed testing.
SISM/IS NRA2 Project Meeting:
The NASA SISM/IS NRA2 Project PI Review Meeting in Sunnyvale, CA, Apr. 5-7, 2005, was the first assembly of the 20-member project team. Informational presentations summarized the SISM/IS NRA2 Project Plan, SISM and ESR&T goals, ESMD spirals, and ESR&T reporting requirements. Technical talks and/or posters were presented by the 20 WBS task leads. Technical breakout groups helped integrate tasks into cohesive sub-elements with metrics and testing plans, presented at the end of the meeting.
Software Assurance Technologies:
The NASA Software Engineering Initiative, led by the Office of the Chief Engineer, helps infuse software engineering research results into NASA practice. Tom Pressburger recently gave a Software Working Group video teleconference (ViTS; http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/researchinfusion) on available technologies for 2006 collaborative pilot projects funded by the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance's Software Assurance Research Program (OSMA SARP). Proposers can select from thirteen software assurance technologies in seven categories, including Usability & Architecture from Bonnie John of CMU and SpecTRM from Safeware Engineering.
MARCH 2005:
World Aerospace Congress Sessions:
The World Aerospace Congress (WAC; http://www.sae.org/events/wac/) is a forum for the international aircraft design, development, operations, and research communities. Jorge Bardina of NASA Ames is Chair of the Information Sciences Committee of SAE Aerospace, which is sponsoring 32 presentations in 8 information sciences sessions at WAC 2005, to be held Oct. 3-6, in Dallas, TX.
Fast Continuous Planning and Execution:
Autonomous systems need robust controllers for activity planning, and must be able to replan on the fly as unforeseen events arise. Brian Williams' robotic systems group at MIT has developed a very fast Incremental Temporal Consistency (ITC) algorithm for flexible planning and continuous, real-time automated reasoning, with an order-of-magnitude speed increase on cooperative air vehicle surveillance scenarios.
Brahms Simulation Interface Evaluation:
Scientific study of mission operations may lead to improved practices. The Ames Human-Centered Computing (HCC) group has used Brahms to model and simulate MER mission operations work practices from JPL's 2002-2003 design sessions and field tests. Chin Seah presented a SIMCHI'05 paper showing ways Brahms could help uncover HCI problems in the design of operations.
SOFIA Flight Planning Advances:
The SOFIA Automated Flight Planning project, led by Jeremy Frank, has developed a novel automated multi-flight planning algorithm based on a previously reported algorithm called Squeaky Wheel Optimization (SWO). The research team's paper describing SWO has been accepted for publication in the 1st Intl. Conf. on Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research.
FEBRUARY 2005:
Cardio-Respiratory Interaction Modeling:
Vadim Smelyanskiy has demonstrated first-ever inference of a nonlinear stochastic model (with hidden variables) for cardiovascular-respiratory functioning, starting from human blood pressure data. This achievement has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.
Mobile Robot Reliability Models:
John Dolan of CMU has improved on manufacturers' reliability models for motors and motor controller boards, by incorporating mechanical load and temperature in mean time to failure (MTTF) calculations. For rover and mobile robot applications, Dolan has characterized serial (replacement) and parallel module reliability.
Software Verification/Validation Milestone:
The Code TC Applied Software Engineering (ASE) Group has used formal methods to verify and validate 35 KLOC of executive control code for the K9 rover. Several integration problems were uncovered, leading to a new executive with a simplified architecture. The group will now participate in development of a Plan-Execution Interchange Language (PLEXIL) Executive within the CLARAty rover architecture.
JANUARY 2005:
Ecosystem Prediction Presentations:
Ramakrishna Nemani gave two presentations this December at Nagoya University, Japan: "Biospheric Monitoring and Forecasting using Earth Observing System Data" and "Interannual Variability and Trends in Global Net Primary Production." Nemani's work used the Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System (TOPS) within NASA's Ecocast distributed architecture for remotely monitoring ecosystem parameters.
Distributed Robotics for Assembly:
Sanjiv Singh of CMU recently demonstrated assembly of a four-beam structure by three robots, in research directed toward mixed-initiative construction of large orbital structures. Forty-seven of 50 docking attempts were successful. Building a complete structure involved 194 distinct behavioral subtasks, with about 1,700 task instantiations per run.
Texture-Based Correspondence Display:
Michael Gerald-Yamasaki has been developing texture patches as a visual tool for discovery methods that function on large, distributed, multidimensional, multivariate databases (such as earth science data with spatial and temporal dynamics). His paper has been accepted for June '05 publication in the proceedings of the Conf. on Visualization and Data Analysis 2005 (VDA 2005).
Mobile Agents Field Experiments Talk:
Bill Clancey will present "Mobile Agents 2004 Field Experiments: Fitting Robot Capabilities to Human Activities" on January 11, 2005. Clancey will describe a two-week Mars-analog simulation with extravehicular activities (EVAs) of over five hours and one kilometer.
Process-Integrated Distributed Control:
The Process-Integrated Mechanism (PIM) is a novel software architecture for coordinating a team of semi-autonomous robots, under development at the University of Florida (UFL) Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Agents are viewed as parts of a single mechanism integrated by a coordinating process that moves among the components.
DECEMBER 2004:
SOFIA Operations Study:
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) must minimize water vapor in its telescope's line of site, either by flying at high altitude or by performing observations when targets are high in the sky. Automated Flight Planner (AFP) software will help satisfy as many observation requests as possible, with allowance for predicted wind and weather conditions. The SOFIA AFP team recently presented a study of the line-of-sight water vapor trade space to the SOFIA Core Science Working Group and to the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) at HQ.
Virtual Sensors for Polar Cloud Recognition:
Virtual sensors use available data bands to estimate unavailable ones. Remote sensing data for astronomy or earth science are often collected in differing spatial and spectral resolutions by different instruments. Virtual bands adjust for this, and are easy for experimenters to use.
Ecocast Data Management Demonstrated:
The Ecocast distributed software system combines heterogeneous data sources to create on-demand data products for biospheric monitoring and forecasting. Users can now customize results via prioritized lists of preferences, perhaps optimizing delivery time, resolution, or data sources (e.g., preferring NEXRAD over NCDC, then GCIP over RUC).
SemanticOrganizer Team Wins Honors:
Rich Keller and the SemanticOrganizer team won two top awards at the International Semantic Web Conference. The first was a best conference paper award; the second was a third-place win -- out of a field of 18 submissions -- in the Semantic Web Challenge 2004 competition.
Educational Robot Exhibit in Japan:
Japan World Expo and the Japanese Space Agency will rent CMU's Personal Exploration Robot (PER) exhibit through 2005. Approximately 15 million visitors will interact with PER robots during the Expo, controlling their motion and capturing images.
Google Scholar Announced:
NSF, DARPA, and NASA funded the Stanford Digital Libraries Project, headed by Hector Garcia-Molina, under a joint Digital Libraries initiative. Other participants included the U.S. High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and industrial partners ACM and IEEE. Part of this funding supported graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in research that led to the Google search engine. The impact from NASA's support -- administered by SISM's predecessor, the Computing, Information and Communications Technology (CICT) Program -- reached a new level with Google's recent launch of Google Scholar.
Team Work Center for NEEMO 7 Operations:
Team Work Center provided collaborative teamwork support for JSC's Exploration Planning and Operations Center (ExPOC) control room during the 11-day NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO 7) mission in October. This mission evaluated telemedicine techniques for emergencies on the International Space Station (ISS) or on future space exploration missions.
Subvocal Speech Technology:
It can be hard to make yourself understood in noisy environments or when you are wearing a face mask, mouthpiece, or pressurized breathing system. Chuck Jorgensen and Brad Betts have a solution, based on subvocal speech. ScienceCentral News recently recorded a demonstration of this technology for possible use on PBS NOVA.
Understanding Brain Oscillations:
Oscillatory electroencephalographic (EEG) activity in the brain has been hypothesized to mediate both sensory processing and communication between brain regions. Kevin Knuth and eleven NIH-funded collaborators have demonstrated that attention modulates oscillatory activity across the entire visual system, even down to the earliest processing stages in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). This will help us monitor pilot/astronaut attentional states, and create more effective brain-computer interfaces.
Astronaut Class Views Intelligent Systems:
The 2004 NASA Astronaut Class visited the Ames Computational Sciences Division on Nov. 16, 2004. SISM's Intelligent Systems Project funded many of the demonstrated advanced technologies for in-flight use, including the Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA), Clarissa spoken dialog system, and Mobile Agents support for an advanced extravehicular activity (EVA) communications system.
Mars Field Trial Lecture:
Maarten Sierhuis of RIACS presented results of Remote Science Team (RST)/Crew collaboration activities during the 2004 Mobile Agents field test, in which distributed teams of geology and biology students and scientists in the US and a remote meeting facilitator in the UK participated in the crew's extravehicular activities (EVAs) over the course of two weeks.
Capture of Operations Knowledge:
Charlotte Linde's paper on "Planning Mars Memory: Learning from the MER Mission" describes observational studies of the MER science and engineering team during three months of twin rover operations.
MER Ethnographic Talks:
Roxana Wales of the Collaborative and Assistant Systems (CAS) research area gave a keynote presentation on ethnographic methods at a one-day Ethnography Symposium in San Francisco, using examples from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Mission.
SPIF-e Planner for Human-Robotic Activity:
The SPIF-e (Science Planning InterFace to engineering) mission planning tool aims to push tactical constraint generation earlier into activity planning processes, reducing activity planning time by an order of magnitude.
NOVEMBER 2004:
Laser Elevation Mapping for Safe Landing:
The Autonomous Rotorcraft Project (ARP) successfully completed initial flight testing of a down-looking scanning laser for mapping and obstacle avoidance. Stanford point-cloud generation software processed the range data to identify elevated or steep ground areas.
Autonomy Software for Event Monitoring:
Event monitoring software for the Advanced Rotorcraft Project (ARP) quickly analyzes multiple data streams from instruments and ground systems. This capability -- recently integrated into the project's Apex reactive planner/executive -- watches for incipient failures, relevant human activities, or other important logical or temporal patterns.
Desktop Simulation for UAVs:
Ames has updated RIPTIDE (Real-time Interactive Prototype Technology Integration/Development Environment), a real-time desktop simulation tool for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research. The new release can simulate obstacle detection sensors, has new camera views and storage capability for stereo imaging, and offers enhanced map and object scenario display.
CIP and MAPGEN Leads Honored:
Joan Walton and John Schreiner, the MER Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) leads, and Kanna Rajan, the Mixed-initiative Activity Plan Generator (MAPGEN) lead, have been awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal.
Accountability Client Delivered:
Accountability information reflects the status of data relative to the person requesting it. Ames has developed an Accountability Client for collecting, analyzing, and distributing accountability information, to help get scientific results to WebGDS ground data system users.
Social Simulation and Design in BrahmsVE:
"The Cognitive Modeling of Social Behaviors," a chapter about BrahmsVE -- an agent-based visual simulation environment -- has been accepted for publication in Cognition and Multi-Agent Interaction, a Cambridge University Press book edited by Ron Sun. The chapter is by Clancey, Sierhuis, Damer, and Brodsky.
Habitat Simulation and Design Paper:
Bill Clancey's paper on the recent Mars Desert Research Station trial (MDRS5, Apr. 2002), has been accepted for publication in the journal Habitation. The article reviews related habitat research, with emphasis on survivability, comfort, performance, and adaptability.
Thruster Fault Identification Tested:
An air-bearing testbed was used for the first successful thruster fault detection and isolation (FDI) test on the volleyball-sized MIT SPHERES satellites. The work will enable docking and other maneuvers in space even with clogged, leaking, or off-nominal thrusters, despite unknown mass distribution in a vehicle.
Milestone Rover Integration Test:
On Oct. 27, the Ames K9 rover demonstrated single-cycle instrument placement at the Ames Marscape outdoor test facility. Over three hours, it approached four observation points, checked for safety, and obtained the requested microscopic images. The MER rovers currently operating on Mars would require up to twelve sols to accomplish the same feat.
Model-Based Instructional Systems:
Bill Clancey has been publicizing NASA's unique instructional situation and methods, including artificial intelligence approaches to training for extravehicular activity (EVA) on the Moon or Mars. Intelligent training and tutoring programs allow students to solve problems in different ways, by tracking the students' knowledge and preferences. Such multi-agent and virtual reality job performance aids can increase crew self-reliance.
OCTOBER 2004:
Educational Uses of Personal Rovers:
The low-cost Personal Exploration Rover (PER) design for museum, school, and home use can now follow a wall using visual servoing. Rovers are also being given the ability to recognize and follow other PER units, allowing programming of social behaviors. PER's programming is motivated by its educational role.
AveBoost Ensemble Classifier:
The Ames Data Mining and Complex Adaptive Systems Group has published a new machine-learning algorithm with better performance than the popular AdaBoost ensemble classifier. When training data is noisy, AveBoost outperforms the popular AdaBoost by up to 7.5% on new data. One important application is cloud detection, where image pixels that are partially cloudy may be labeled either cloudy or cloud-free in training data.
Design of Distributed Intelligence:
Kagan Tumer and David Wolpert recently authored Collectives and the Design of Complex Systems, about distributed networks that optimally achieve system-wide goals. Applications may include packet-switched communication networks, information grids, air traffic control networks, formation flying, and other distributed control problems.
Autonomous Rotorcraft Control Studies:
Staff from the U.S. Army and from NASA successfully completed acquisition of forward-flight frequency data for the RMAX helicopter, for development of flight control laws. The team has also demonstrated a stereo correspondence algorithm for hazard avoidance.
Livingstone Uploaded to EO-1:
Livingstone (L2) diagnostic software has been uploaded to the Earth Observing One (EO-1) remote sensing satellite, for monitoring and diagnosis of its imaging instruments and solid-state recorder. L2 presents several hypotheses with their probabilities and can isolate common-cause faults to their root cause. L2 also diagnoses faults that impact multiple subsystems, scaling well with increasing system complexity.
PLASMA Contingency Planner Presented:
NASA's PLASMA contingency planner -- evolved from EUROPA -- should be ready for general availability in early 2005. An implementation of ground-based contingency planning in PLASMA was recently demonstrated on the Ames rover, allowing the rover to plan and navigate a complex path to multiple rock targets.
International Recognition for SemanticOrganizer:
SemanticOrganizer is one of the top three Semantic Web Challenge candidates this year. Eighteen submissions competed, the fruit of coordinated investments by DARPA, NSF, and European research agencies. Applications must use heterogeneous real-world data from geographically distributed information sources under diverse ownership.
Rover Instrument Placement in Record Time:
Recent Ames integration tests of autonomous planning and execution included K9 rover instrument placement with centimeter accuracy, on four designated targets. The software generated navigation plans with contingencies to handle tracking failures, resource constraints, and time restrictions. The complete test took only one hour and 25 minutes, with no plan failures encountered.
Robotic Autonomy Demonstration:
The IS Automated Reasoning subproject has completed an autonomy milestone by demonstrating single-command-cycle vehicle positioning and contact instrument placement in an analogue rover science mission. Rovers were also able to choose their own targets, via on-board recognition of serendipitous science opportunities. Demonstrated software technologies include automated planning and scheduling, science data priority assignment, robust execution systems, and automated mode estimation and diagnosis.
Ecological Forecasting:
The Intelligent Ecosystem Prediction task used CMU's TETRAD causal discovery system to develop a first-ever predictive wildfire risk model for the Western U.S. fire season. A distributed system now produces fire risk forecasts from heterogeneous remote sensing data.
SEPTEMBER 2004:
Iconic Interface for Personal Rovers:
The Personal Exploration Rover (PER) is a low-cost mobile rover platform that children can use for science missions in their homes and backyards. The PER now has an iconic interface for easier programming.
Automating Scientific Investigation:
Kevin Knuth's inquiry calculus can determine the degree to which an experiment resolves a scientific issue. He is investigating this for design of intelligent data acquisition and analysis systems, and for quantification of preferences in decision theory. Two papers are in press, on "Deriving Laws from Ordering Relations" and "Lattice Duality: The Origin of Probability and Entropy."
MSL Rover Capabilities:
Tara Estlin at JPL reports progress in rover software development for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. A data analysis system that identifies rock patches and deposits has been integrated into JPL's overall MISUS architecture. The rockfinder system has been integrated with obstacle avoidance and stereo localization. The rover can also add new goals and actions in response to opportunistic science events.
Wireless Health Monitoring:
Vadim Smelyanskiy is developing a wireless IR system for monitoring the physiological data of astronauts or pilots. Software is being implemented for real-time dynamical inference on the streaming data -- EKG, blood-pressure, respiration, etc. -- to monitor the subject's health.
Fundamental Advance in Brain Understanding:
The Data Mining and Complex Adaptive Systems Group at Ames has demonstrated a predominant role for stimulus-evoked activity in sensory ERP generation. The resulting paper was chosen as the Feature Article in the May 2004 issue of Cerebral Cortex. Kevin Knuth is now leading an effort to characterize human EEG responses in a single experimental trial.
AUGUST 2004:
Inference of Dynamical Models from Data:
Vadim Smelyanskiy reports progress on inferring dynamical models with hidden variables, from time-series data. One application is the modeling of climate effects on dynamical self-regulating food webs. Another is non-invasive cardiac monitoring from physiological data, including in-flight monitoring G-force effects on human physiology.
Mars Society Mobile Agents Presentation:
Bill Clancey was invited to make a plenary presentation at the 7th annual International Mars Society Convention, on "The Mobile Agents 2004 Field Test: Fitting Robot Capabilities to Human Activities." Video of the CICT-funded Mobile Agents demonstration was complemented by a full track of papers organized by Maarten Sierhuis.
Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Calibration:
The Ames Information Physics Group has performed rigorous calibration of electro-optic sensors for atmospheric studies. Dogan Timuçin has also constructed a rigorous atmospheric radiative transfer model, and is exploring the topography of error surfaces for optimal estimation.
Mixture Density Mercer Kernel for Virtual Sensors:
Mercer Kernel methods can outperform Gaussian mixture models for unsupervised clustering and mixture separation. The new similarity measure between data points is being used to develop "virtual sensors" that combine available data bands to estimate unavailable ones, in both earth science and astronomy.
Ames Rover Engineering Readiness:
The Ames rover can autonomously place instruments on rocks after negotiating a tortuous path up to 70 degrees away from the rover's initial orientation. New components are being integrated for a milestone demonstration.
Tetrad Causal Analysis of Earth Science Data:
The Tetrad Causal Analysis System finds likely causal explanations for observed data. One success within NASA's Intelligent Ecosystem Prediction (IEP) project has been discovery of a new wildfire risk model. Another success found a novel way to discover climate index models from remotely sensed sea surface temperature and sea level pressure data.
Automated Wildfire Risk Forecast:
The Intelligent Ecosystem Prediction Project (IEP) has used a distributed forecasting system to produce forecasts of fire risk from a model discovered by machine learning algorithms in heterogeneous remote sensing data. Models developed at IHMC are used by the Ames IMAGEbot Planner to generate forecasts using the Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System (TOPS) for biospheric forecasting and the Tetrad causal discovery system.
Ecocast Integrated with the Fetch Web Agent:
The Intelligent Ecosystem Prediction Project (IEP) has added a Web-based agent to their Ecocast biospheric monitoring and forecasting system. The agent scans for reports of fire occurrence, triggering data gathering and analysis for all locations where fires occurred. This event-driven delivery of NASA satellite data will help resource managers respond to wildfires and other natural disasters.
Virtual Sensors:
New Earth-observing instruments such as MODIS permit differentiation of cloud cover from surface snow. Machine learning techniques are creating "virtual sensors" that extend this ability to pre-MODIS geophysical data. Virtual sensors are also being used to estimate high-resolution galactic redshift from low-resolution spectra.
Clarissa Assistant Accepted for ISS Flight:
An ISS flight version of the Clarissa conversational procedure assistant has been accepted at JSC. Clarissa helps astronauts by reading out procedure steps, with hands- and eyes-free navigation of the procedure via spoken commands.
GoalNets Editor Accepted:
JPL is testing the GoalNets subnet viewer/editor for the Mars Science Lab (MSL). Goalnets -- formalized representations of state variables with time constraints -- are part of the Mission Data System (MDS) framework. A goalnets editor permits viewing, manipulation, and composition of goals, constraints, subnets, state variables, and value histories.
XBoards Tested for the Phoenix Mission:
Three XBoards (formerly known as MERBoards) have been installed for the upcoming Phoenix Mars Lander. XBoards provide a whiteboard, web browser, ubiquitous data space, remote access, and control and broadcast, for individual or group situation awareness.
JULY 2004:
SOFIA Automated Flight Planner Test:
The SOFIA Automated Flight Planner (AFP) has been tested with two 25-hour sample sets of observations for the FORCAST instrument. This was the first realistic test case for the AFP, which was used to perform what-if tradeoffs for water vapor constraints.
CICT/Air Force Contact Meeting:
The Ames Human Factors R&T Division hosted an information exchange and planning meeting, concerning research topics of mutual interest to NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Simulated Launch and Range Operations:
Work on the Launch and Range Operations Testbed task was presented at KSC. This includes the Virtual Range (VR), Virtual Testbed (VTB), and Weather Expert System (WES). The testbed software automates range safety calculations, Shuttle launch preparation/operations, and weather-related reasoning.
InvestigationOrganizer Team Honored:
The InvestigationOrganizer team supporting the Columbia Accident Investigation Board has been chosen for NASA's 2004 Turning Goals Into Reality (TGIR) Award, in the Associate Administrator's Choice category. InvestigationOrganizer is an extension of SemanticOrganizer, and grew out of IS funding for ScienceOrganizer.
MER IT Infusion Team Honored:
The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Information Technology Infusion Team is being recognized with a NASA TGIR Group Achievement Award. The IT Infusion Team developed software and provided 24/7 support for MER operations, with outstanding success.
PSA Team Honored:
A Group Achievement Award has also been announced for the Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA) First Generation Team led by Greg Dorais, which developed a spherical "robot" that can navigate within the International Space Station to monitor environmental conditions.
Thruster Fault Identification:
Robert Mah has developed a simplified, minimal-code implementation of thruster fault detection and identification (FDI) to control the MIT SPHERES spacecraft. A mass-property identification algorithm has also been developed, for SPHERES' first test session aboard the ISS (manifested on this summer's P15 launch).
Planning for Over-Subscribed Resources:
Dave Smith recently presented his progress on over-subscription planning. NASA problems often require selection of the best possible subset of over-subscribed goals. Examples include observation planning for telescopes like the Hubble, SIRTF, and SOFIA; scheduling for the Deep Space Network; and planning of Mars rover science experiments.
Autonomous Rotorcraft Vision Study:
The Autonomous Rotorcraft Project (ARP) under Matt Whalley has compared and combined four stereo vision techniques for 3-D range detection and obstacle avoidance. The rotorcraft vision system now generates a 3-D object Òpoint cloudÓ that feeds into Jason HowlettÕs obstacle-avoidance algorithm, which searches for flight paths furthest from any flight obstructions. The initial goal is one full detection cycle every five seconds, sufficient for certain real-life flight scenarios. Testing was done on real-world stereo image pairs from the archives of past ARP RMAX flights, including both natural and engineered objects.
MSF Testing of Rover On-Board Planning:
ARC's Conditional Executive for on-board rover activity planning has completed a test round on the Mission Simulation Facility (MSF) rover simulator. The simulation study helped improve the software.
JUNE 2004:
CMUcam for Educational Robotics:
Popular Science Magazine has published an article by Jonathan Coulton about building a $200 home robot using the CMUcam vision module, developed for the Personal Exploration Rover (PER). CMUcam and CMUcam2 are now commercially available, and selling "in the thousands."
Control of Autonomous UAV Missions:
ARC researchers presented their work on autonomous rotorcraft surveillance at the DOD/NASA workshop on Human Factors of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
Personal Rover Educational Outreach:
A completed application programming interface (API) for the Personal Exploration Rover (PER) is being tested by students in several outreach efforts, including the Oklahoma Scholar's Academy and the Carnegie Mellon West capstone engineering program.
MAPGEN Effort Wins TGIR Award:
The Ames MER Infusion effort led by Kanna Rajan has been chosen for NASA's 2004 Turning Goals Into Reality (TGIR) Award. The cited work includes infusion of the MAPGEN constraint-based science activity planner and the related Constraint Editor system for capturing science intent.
Presentation of Human Modeling Research:
HCC-supported work on human-system modeling was presented at the 13th Annual Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (BRIMS).
MAY 2004:
Bioelectric Interface Patent:
Chuck Jorgensen and Kevin Wheeler have been granted a U.S. patent for bioelectric interface technology, covering their discoveries in electromyogram (EMG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) signal processing for hands-free commanding of computer-mediated actions.
Silent Speech Recognition:
Another new technology from the Ames Extension of Human Senses Group is automated recognition of subvocalized speech. Button-sized microphones on the throat pick up subauditory speech.
Medical Image Segmentation:
Bartron Medical Imaging, LLC, is commercializing James Tilton's software for hierarchical segmentation of images. HSEG has also been used to recursively segment Landsat TM images and IMAGE-spacecraft Radio Plasma Imager data.
Mobile Agents Field Test:
More than 50 people participated in Rotation 29 at the Mars Society's Desert Research Station (MDRS, April 25-May 9), a rotation dedicated to testing NASA's Mobile Agents EVA communications system. The EVA Robotic Assistant (ERA) followed mock astronauts, helping with communications and field geology sample collection.
Human-Robotic Interactions:
Bill Clancey's article on "Roles for Agent Assistants in Field Science: Personal Projects and Collaboration" has appeared in a special issue on Human-Robotic Interactions. He says the question is not human-robotic interaction, but support for people interacting with each other.
Agent Tracking in Dynamic Environments:
Yellowstone National Park officials are reportedly enthusiastic about Susan Alexander's work on wolf/elk tracking (with potential application to multi-agent astronaut/robot tracking for Mars exploration).
SOFIA Flight Planner Extended:
The SOFIA Automated Flight Planning project now avoids time-sensitive and altitude-specific special-use airspace (SUA) zones. Another extension handles airport runway selection.
Autonomous Reconnaissance Demonstration:
The Autonomous Rotorcraft Project (ARP) aerial robot performed an autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance mission in support of the Collapsed Structure Rescue exercise at Ames on May 6-7. Witnesses to this simulation included Nancy Suski, Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response for the Department of Homeland Security.
Educational Rovers Delivered:
Illah Nourbakhsh -- at ARC on leave from CMU -- has delivered 38 (of 40) PER "personal rovers" for science education, and has provided training to personnel at ARC, GSFC, and NASA HQ. Formal educational results from PER-based summer courses have been accepted as a full-length article in the Autonomous Robotics journal.
PSA Robot at NEXTFEST 2004:
Greg Dorais has been developing a Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA) for astronauts on the ISS. The PSA was featured at a NASA HQ-sponsored kiosk in the Wired NEXTFEST 2004, San Francisco, May 14-16.
Thruster Fault Management Tests:
Robert Mah at ARC has a thruster fault-detection and isolation (FDI) experiment on the manifest for the Progress (14P) launch to the ISS on 5/19/04. The test will involve a thruster-controlled MIT SPHERES module.
Intelligent Robotics for Hubble Rescue:
IS PI Vladimir Lumelsky has joined the Hubble Group at GSFC, helping to develop robot technologies that may save the Hubble Telescope and advance the state of the art in robotic servicing and in-space assembly.
Subbarao Kambhampati Honored:
Principal investigator Subbarao Kambhampati of Arizona State University has been elected a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in recognition of his contributions to automated planning.
APRIL 2004:
DIMES Aided MER Landings:
A little-known component of the MER mission was the Descent Image Motion Estimation Subsystem (DIMES), a vision-based software system that allowed Spirit's lateral thrusters to compensate for Martian winds.
Mobile Agents Field Test in the News:
The Mobile Agents system at Ames is being prepared for field tests in the Utah desert. Software agents in backpack- and rover-based computers will record astronauts' field notes, transmit commands to the rovers (and warnings to the astronauts), and perform other intelligent support functions.
Viz 3D Modeling Software is in Demand:
The Viz team in the Ames Intelligent Robotics Group has received a number of requests for release of Viz and related browsing tools to mission scientists' home institutions.
SLAB Acoustic Modeling Software:
SLAB (Sound Lab) is a real-time, software-based system for creating virtual acoustic environments used in psycho-acoustic research. It generates localized sound sources without the expense of physical simulations.
Intent Capture and Communication:
Jay Trimble's Human-Centered Computing Group at Ames is looking beyond its MERBoard success. For the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), the group is designing a collaborative user interface for goal nets that will allow users to create, edit, and visualize complex goal networks.
Cmaptools with Intelligent Suggesters:
Concept maps (Cmaps) are an easy-to-use graphical and quasi-propositional representation for knowledge capture and sharing. David Leake of Indiana University has been adding a concept suggester to help a Cmap developer add new concept boxes.
Agent Software for Distributed Operations:
Jane Malin's Human-Centered Assistant Systems team at JSC has developed software tools and agents to support distributed, collaborative mission operations teamwork. Two of the teamwork tool prototypes are being evaluated at JSC Mission Control Center (MCC) in 2004, via ISS mission simulations.
Mobile Agents Project "Marscape" Test:
The Mobile Agents Project at Ames and JSC uses software agents to help coordinate astronauts, vehicles, and robots during scientific field operations. The development team has completed a successful Operational Readiness Test (ORT), including simulated operations in Ames' outdoor "Marscape" test facility.
MEX Networks for Planetary Exploration:
Field simulations for the Mobile Agents Project have spurred advances in wireless LAN backbone and cluster configuration for support of planetary fieldwork.
MERBoard Highlighted in New Book:
Kenton O'Hara's new book, Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies, examines the new field of public and situated displays. Chapter 2 describes MERBoard research in the context of computer-supported cooperative work.
Lessons from CIP Use:
The Collaborative Information Portal has delivered over 88 GB in 256K files to 330 registered users (as of 3/14/04). An average of about 50 clients are active at any given time. A study of CIP's performance may lead to improvements in future systems.
MER Science Work Studies:
The Ames Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group has been collecting data on MER science and uplink operations. This will give future missions an empirical understanding of ground systems tools -- e.g., MERBoard, the Science Activity Planner (SAP), and Constraint Editor/MAPGEN.
Obstacle Avoidance Path Planner Flight:
The Autonomous Rotorcraft Project has successfully flown an Obstacle Avoidance Path Planner (OAPP) that calculates routes around known obstacles.
Software Agents with Human Behavior:
Jane Malin of JSC has presented a paper on the three types of control and communication that computers must have to emulate human-to-human loose coordination in operations teamwork.
Susan Rinkus Wins Nursing Informatics Award:
Susan Rinkus of the University of Texas at Houston won a Nursing Informatics Award for the paper "Designing a Knowledge Management System for Distributed Activities: A Human Centered Approach" (with K.A. Johnson-Throop and J. Zhang).
Clarissa Procedure Assistant Training Release:
The Clarissa team has completed a training release of their procedure and checklist assistant system, moving toward a flight experiment later this year. Clarissa is an interactive dialogue system to help astronauts navigate complex International Space Station (ISS) procedures.
Fault-Adaptive Life Support Control:
Gautam Biswas of Vanderbilt University is developing model-based fault recovery for distributed NASA spacecraft environmental control and life support systems.
MARCH 2004:
Ames Autonomous Rotorcraft Flight:
The CICT-funded Autonomous Rotorcraft Project successfully flew the NASA-developed Apex reactive planner. Apex sequenced operator-selected targets and computed waypoint locations for transition, approach, and observation.
Viz 3D Models Aid MER Operations:
Viz stereo pipeline data can now feed spectral analysis software, for 3-D regions of interest. This helped distinguish "blueberry" spectral signatures from those of surrounding rock.
JSC DCI Team Selected for AIM Benchmark:
Debra Schreckenghost and JSC's team for "Distributed Crew Interaction with Advanced Life Support Control Systems" have been selected to participate in an Advanced Integration Matrix (AIM) Benchmark Test. AIM will develop, test, and validate the integration of mission systems for long-duration human exploration missions.
Launch and Range Simulation:
The Launch and Range Operations Virtual Test Bed (VTB) at UCF includes models of air traffic, space launch trajectory data, "return to launch site" profiles, and models of weather, range instruments, instrument scheduling, conflict prediction, and cognitive process analysis.
UCF NASA Faculty Fellows at KSC:
José Sepulveda and Luis Rabelo of UCF's Launch and Range Operations Virtual Test Bed (VTB) have been selected by the NASA Faculty Fellowship Program (NFFP). This will aid VTB tech infusion to KSC.
D-Logger for BioMedical Engineer Support:
BioMedical Engineer (BME) flight controllers used and evaluated JSC's D-Logger (Databased-Logger) in Space Station mission simulations.
ScienceOrganizer Communications Agent:
A ScienceOrganizer Communications Agent can help coordinate exploration operations, tracking scientific and mission-related data. Remotely located science team members will be able to direct the activities of field explorers and robotic assistants through the ScienceOrganizer interface.
Viz Supports the Microscopic Imager:
The Viz team has developed a new class of Microscopic Imager (MI) products, used initially for supporting "cross-bedding" hypotheses.
MAPGEN Catches a Cold Camera:
MAPGEN planning software noticed that a Spirit camera would need a one-minute heating activity. This was a mild surprise to the planning team.
Rover Opportunistic Science Capability:
Tara Estlin of JPL has put together a video of the FIDO rover responding to "science alerts" in the JPL Mars Yard. The rover turned, took a new image of the target, and then continued its original traverse.
Design-level Code Verification:
Dimitra Giannakopoulou and Corina Pasareanu have used formal methods and design-level specifications to verify NASA's K9 Rover Executive (with 25K lines of C++ code). This was a ten-fold improvement in design-level verification and three-fold improvement in code verification. Future research development will add run-time verification to further increase scalability.
CIP Appreciation:
The Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) system has had only four hours of server downtime over the MER mission to date. CIP is installed on all of the approximately 250 Flight Operations surface workstations and over 229 personal computers. It was developed with funding from CICT CNIS and IS/HCC.
Automated Planning/Scheduling Successes:
Constraint Editor (CE) and the MAPGEN Planner generated a MER-A Sol 59 plan containing almost 2700 low-level activities, including a branch depending on outcome of a rock abrasion process. On Sol 60, the team planned a two-sol schedule -- the first time this had been done.
Len Trejo Honored:
Leonard J. Trejo will be featured as "Professional of the Week" by the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference (HENAAC), March 22, 2004.
dFTS-SIR Spectrometer Deployed:
The dispersed Fourier Transform Spectrometer (dFTS) with its Spectral Inference Reconstruction (SIR) system has begun operation and characterization at the Clay Center (Brookline, MA) 25-inch telescope. The instrument may be sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized extrasolar planets via Doppler shifts in a star's spectrum.
John Bresina of Ames Commands Opportunity:
On the night of February 25th, John Bresina took charge as the Tactical Activity Planner (TAP) for Opportunity, becoming the first Ames employee to command a rover on the surface of another planet. Activity plans produced by Bresina and the Ames Planning and Scheduling Group received high praise.
Viz Applications:
Science Operations Working Group (SOWG) chair John Grotzinger used the Viz 3-D modeling tool on MER-B Sols 31-36 to develop and communicate the Opportunity outcrop activity plan. In particular, planning of imaging for the "Last Chance" outcrop was complex.
FEBRUARY 2004:
Viz 3D Modeling Applications:
The Viz team has built a 3-D model of the "Bonneville" crater from orbital imagery, and generated a shadow study to help Ray Arvidson determine the best way for MER-A to approach the crater.
Constraint Editor/MAPGEN Productivity:
MER-A Sol 50 activities required a complex interleaving of science between drive segments -- the most difficult planning process so far. Constraint Editor and MAPGEN helped make it happen. For MER-B Sol 28, Constraint Editor dealt with 3,127 constraints -- far more than it was ever tested with.
GoalNets Editor for MSL'09:
Scientists at ARC, JPL, and CMU are working toward a next-generation mixed-initiative planning tool, the GoalNets Editor for Mission Data Systems (MDS). It will upload goal networks instead of command sequences.
Viz 3D Terrain Modeling:
The Viz team has been working with orbital imagery for landing site modeling, and with close-up imagery for Rock Abrasion Tool placement.
CIP Displays Rover Timelines:
Rover Activity Plan event timelines generated by the MAPGEN team are now available within the Collaborative Information Portal (CIP).
MERBoard Information Sharing:
Eighteen MERBoards are operational in the MER Mission Support Areas, providing situational awareness and image display, assessment, and markup. The long-term planning group uses MERBoard's Sol Tree Tool to develop multiple flow chart representations of alternative rover paths and activities. Data can also be exported to the MERBoard whiteboard, and MERBoard's ubiquitous data spaces are being used for hypothesis files and target naming data.
MAPGEN for Conditional Planning:
The MAPGEN constraint-based planner helped put together a single-Sol conditional science plan for first use of the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) on the rock "Adirondack."
CIP Use:
The Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) is now simultaneously supporting both MER-A (Spirit) and MER-B (Opportunity), especially schedule management for science activities.
Bill Clancey Honored:
Bill Clancey, Chief Scientist for Human-Centered Computing (HCC), has been chosen by Irish America Magazine as one of its 100 outstanding Irish Americans. Clancey's recently televised talk, "If We Have Robots, Why is NASA Sending People to Mars?," highlighted management of the MER robotic laboratories and how this relates to human exploration.
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