Robotics Commons^™

Swarm Intelligence, A Blackboard Architecture And Local Decision Making For Spacecraft Command, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

Control of a multi-spacecraft constellation is a topic of significant inquiry, at present. This paper presents and evaluates a command architecture for a multi-spacecraft mission. It combines swarm techniques with a decentralized / local decision making architecture (which uses a set of shared blackboards for coordination) and demonstrates the efficacy of this approach. Under this approach, the Blackboard software architecture is used to facilitate data sharing between craft as part of a resilient hierarchy and the swarm techniques are used to coordinate activity. The paper begins with an overview of prior work on the precursor command technologies and then presents …

Characterization Of Extended And Simplified Intelligent Water Drop (Siwd) Approaches And Their Comparison To The Intelligent Water Drop (Iwd) Approach, Jeremy Straub, Eunjin Kim

Jeremy Straub

This paper presents a simplified approach to performing the Intelligent Water Drops (IWD) process. This approach is designed to be comparatively lightweight while approximating the results of the full IWD process. The Simplified Intelligent Water Drops (SIWD) approach is specifically designed for applications where IWD must be run in a computationally limited environment (such as on a robot, UAV or small spacecraft) or where performance speed must be maximized for time sensitive applications. The SWID approach is described and compared and contracted to the base IWD approach.

The Multi-Tier Mission Architecture And A Different Approach To Entry, Descent And Landing, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

Planetary missions are generally very well planned out. Where the spacecraft will be deployed, what it will do there and in what order are generally determined before launch. While some allowance is made for greater depth exploration of scientifically interesting items identified during the investigation, a successful mission is (generally) one that doesn’t deviate significantly from its planning. When sending an initial mission to an unsurveyed planet or moon, however, this approach is not suitable. Current space technology provides the capability to send a combined survey and lander mission (instead of conducting an initial survey mission and following it up …

Enabling Interplanetary Small Spacecraft Science Missions With Model Based Data Analysis, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

Small spacecraft operating outside of Earth orbit are significantly constrained by the communica- tions link available to them. This is particularly true for stand-alone craft that must rely on their own antenna and transmission systems (for which gain and available power generation are limited by form factor); it is also applicable to ‘hitchhiker’-style missions which may be able to utilize (quite likely very limited amounts of) time on the primary spacecraft’s communications equip- ment for long-haul transmission.

This poster presents the adaptation of the Model-Based Transmission Reduction (MBTR) frame- work’s Model-Based Data Analysis (MBDA) component for use on an interplanetary …

A Human Proximity Operations System Test Case Validation Approach, Justin Huber, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

A Human Proximity Operations System (HPOS) poses numerous risks in a real world environment. These risks range from mundane tasks such as avoiding walls and fixed obstacles to the critical need to keep people and processes safe in the context of the HPOS’s situation-specific decision making. Validating the performance of an HPOS, which must operate in a real-world environment, is an ill posed problem due to the complexity that is introduced by erratic (non-computer) actors. In order to prove the HPOS’s usefulness, test cases must be generated to simulate possible actions of these actors, so the HPOS can be shown …