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Remote Agent: An Autonomous Control System for the New Millennium

Kanna Rajan, Douglas Bernard, Gregory Dorais, Edward Gamble, Bob Kanefsky, James Kurien, William Millar, Nicola Muscettola, Pandurang Nayak, Nicolas Rouquette, Benjamin Smith, William Taylor, Yu-wen Tung

On May 17th 1999, the Remote Agent (RA) became the first Artificial Intelligence based closed loop autonomous control system to take control of a spacecraft. The RA commanded NASA's New Millennium Deep Space One probe when it was 65 million miles away from earth. For a period of one week this system commanded the DS1's Ion Propulsion System, its camera, its attitude control and navigation systems. A primary goal of this experiment was to provide an onboard demonstration of spacecraft autonomy. This demonstration included both nominal operations with goal-oriented commanding and closed-loop plan execution, and fault protection capabilities with failure diagnosis and recov- ery, on-board replanning following unrecoverable failures, and system-level fault protection. This paper describes the Remote Agent Experiement (RAX) and the model based approaches to Planning and Scheduling, Plan Execution and Fault Diagnosis and Recovery technologies developed at NASA Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Keywords: autonomy, closed loop control, constraint-based planning, scheduling, temporal networks

Citation: Kanna Rajan, Douglas Bernard, Gregory Dorais, Edward Gamble, Bob Kanefsky, James Kurien, William Millar, Nicola Muscettola, Pandurang Nayak, Nicolas Rouquette, Benjamin Smith, William Taylor, Yu-wen Tung: Remote Agent: An Autonomous Control System for the New Millennium. In W.Horn (ed.): ECAI2000, Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2000, pp.726-730.


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ECAI-2000 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Humboldt University on behalf of Gesellschaft für Informatik.