Title
Risk-Reduction Autonomy Implementation to Enable NASA Artemis Missions
Date Issued
01 January 2022
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Stennis Space Center
Publisher(s)
IEEE Computer Society
Abstract
To achieve NASA's Artemis program mission objectives a high level of autonomy that is ubiquitous throughout the systems that are being developed will be necessary. The autonomous systems of Artemis will require a distributed autonomy capability, with autonomous systems organized functionally in a hierarchical architecture, where systems at higher levels of the hierarchy have authority over systems at lower levels. The challenge of developing autonomy technologies and Concepts of Operations (ConOps) for Artemis has been undertaken by the NASA Gateway Working Group. This group has developed requirements, architectures, ConOps, and interface control documents (ICDs), in the context of a hierarchical distributed architecture that includes the following: a Vehicle System Manager (VSM) that autonomously manages the entire Gateway; Module System Managers (MSMs) that autonomously manage each module; and System Managers (SMs) that autonomously manage systems within a module (i.e., ECLSS). A substantially high level of autonomy needs to be achieved by each element of the hierarchy (VSM, MSM, SM) to meet requirements for uncrewed operations; this includes conditions that will have minimal and/or delayed ground intervention (i.e., requirements for sustainability for months of operation without crew or ground support). To advance an implementation of this autonomy design (Gateway Autonomy Design-GAD), a collaboration was established between the Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASL) at NASA Stennis Space Center and Lockheed Martin. The objectives of this partnership were the following: (1) to implement autonomy at the VSM, MSM, and SM levels; (2) to implement communications among a VSM, 2 MSMs, ORION (a visiting vehicle somewhat equivalent to a module) and 1 SM (a power system), and (3) test autonomous operations with representative use cases. A SM backed by a high-fidelity simulation was created to facilitate demonstrations of use cases that originated in a system of a module. Communication between the VSM and MSMs was implemented according to Concepts of Operations and Interface Control Documents (ICDs). Demonstrations were conducted to address nominal and off-nominal operations and multi-module interactions with the VSM. Additionally, user interfaces were created to provide awareness about ongoing processes and results while enhancing the demonstration. Demonstrations included the following use cases: (1) Orion as visiting vehicle registers with VSM; (2) VSM reschedules a module's timelines when another module's MSM task fails; and (3) a module's Power System Manager (PSM) demonstration that included component failure diagnostics, tracing component failure to effected components, which in turn, reports failure information up to the VSM for acknowledgement and display. This paper will describe the detailed technology and autonomous systems developed, and the integrated multi-module demonstrations conducted. Also, challenges that must be met to fully implement the GAD defined by Gateway will be addressed.
Volume
2022-March
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ingeniería aeroespacial
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85137589380
ISSN of the container
1095323X
ISBN of the container
978-166543760-8
Conference
IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings
Sponsor(s)
Degree at the University of Hartford, CT (1983), and MS and Ph.D. Degrees at The Pennsylvania State University, PA (1984, 1988); all in Mechanical Engi-neering. He was faculty of Mechan-ical Engineering at Tulane University (New Orleans) for 10 years, and Asso-ciate Chair of Advanced Instrumenta-tion and Control at The University of New Brunswick (Canada) for 2 years. He has been at NASA Stennis Space Center since 2000. He has led multiple R&D projects in collaboration with academia, industry, government agencies, and other NASA centers. He is currently Lead for Autonomous Systems and Operations, working on projects funded by NASA Advanced Exploration Systems, Space Technology Mission Directorate, and NASA Stennis Space Center. His areas of interest include Autonomous Operations and Systems, Integrated System Health Management (ISHM), Intelligent Systems, Intelligent Sensors, Robotics, and Automatic Controls.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus