Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions

Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology

Simulation of complex environments:the Fuzzy Cognitive Agent

The world is becoming increasingly competitive by the action of liberalised national and global markets. In parallel these markets have become increasingly complex making it difficult for participants to optimise their trading actions. In response, many differing computer simulation techniques have been investigated to develop either a deeper understanding of these evolving markets or to create effective system support tools. In this paper we report our efforts to develop a novel simulation platform using fuzzy cognitive agents (FCA). Our approach encapsulates fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) generated on the Matlab Simulink platform within commercially available agent software. We firstly present our implementation of Matlab Simulink FCMs and then show how such FCMs can be integrated within a conceptual FCA architecture. Finally we report on our efforts to realise an FCA by the integration of a Matlab Simulink based FCM with the Jack Intelligent Agent Toolkit

Decision blocks: A tool for automating decision making in CLIPS

The human capability of making complex decision is one of the most fascinating facets of human intelligence, especially if vague, judgemental, default or uncertain knowledge is involved. Unfortunately, most existing rule based forward chaining languages are not very suitable to simulate this aspect of human intelligence, because of their lack of support for approximate reasoning techniques needed for this task, and due to the lack of specific constructs to facilitate the coding of frequently reoccurring decision block to provide better support for the design and implementation of rule based decision support systems. A language called BIRBAL, which is defined on the top of CLIPS, for the specification of decision blocks, is introduced. Empirical experiments involving the comparison of the length of CLIPS program with the corresponding BIRBAL program for three different applications are surveyed. The results of these experiments suggest that for decision making intensive applications, a CLIPS program tends to be about three times longer than the corresponding BIRBAL program

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

Study of onboard expert systems to augment space shuttle and space station autonomy

The feasibility of onboard crew activity planning was examined. The use of expert systems technology to aid crewmembers in locating stowed equipment was also investigated. The crew activity planning problem, along with a summary of past and current research efforts, was discussed in detail. The requirements and specifications used to develop the crew activity planning system was also defined. The guidelines used to create, develop, and operate the MFIVE Crew Scheduler and Logistics Clerk were discussed. Also discussed is the mathematical algorithm, used by the MFIVE Scheduler, which was developed to aid in optimal crew activity planning

The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers

The exploration of a category theory-based virtual Geometrical product specification system for design and manufacturing

In order to ensure quality of products and to facilitate global outsourcing, almost all the so-called “world-class” manufacturing companies nowadays are applying various tools and methods to maintain the consistency of a product’s characteristics throughout its manufacturing life cycle. Among these, for ensuring the consistency of the geometric characteristics, a tolerancing language − the Geometrical Product Specification (GPS) has been widely adopted to precisely transform the functional requirements from customers into manufactured workpieces expressed as tolerance notes in technical drawings. Although commonly acknowledged by industrial users as one of the most successful efforts in integrating existing manufacturing life-cycle standards, current GPS implementations and software packages suffer from several drawbacks in their practical use, possibly the most significant, the difficulties in inferring the data for the “best” solutions. The problem stemmed from the foundation of data structures and knowledge-based system design. This indicates that there need to be a “new” software system to facilitate GPS applications. The presented thesis introduced an innovative knowledge-based system − the VirtualGPS − that provides an integrated GPS knowledge platform based on a stable and efficient database structure with knowledge generation and accessing facilities. The system focuses on solving the intrinsic product design and production problems by acting as a virtual domain expert through translating GPS standards and rules into the forms of computerized expert advices and warnings. Furthermore, this system can be used as a training tool for young and new engineers to understand the huge amount of GPS standards in a relative “quicker” manner. The thesis started with a detailed discussion of the proposed categorical modelling mechanism, which has been devised based on the Category Theory. It provided a unified mechanism for knowledge acquisition and representation, knowledge-based system design, and database schema modelling. As a core part for assessing this knowledge-based system, the implementation of the categorical Database Management System (DBMS) is also presented in this thesis. The focus then moved on to demonstrate the design and implementation of the proposed VirtualGPS system. The tests and evaluations of this system were illustrated in Chapter 6. Finally, the thesis summarized the contributions to knowledge in Chapter 7. After thoroughly reviewing the project, the conclusions reached construe that the III entire VirtualGPS system was designed and implemented to conform to Category Theory and object-oriented programming rules. The initial tests and performance analyses show that the system facilitates the geometric product manufacturing operations and benefits the manufacturers and engineers alike from function designs, to a manufacturing and verification

Loo.py: transformation-based code generation for GPUs and CPUs

Today's highly heterogeneous computing landscape places a burden on programmers wanting to achieve high performance on a reasonably broad cross-section of machines. To do so, computations need to be expressed in many different but mathematically equivalent ways, with, in the worst case, one variant per target machine. Loo.py, a programming system embedded in Python, meets this challenge by defining a data model for array-style computations and a library of transformations that operate on this model. Offering transformations such as loop tiling, vectorization, storage management, unrolling, instruction-level parallelism, change of data layout, and many more, it provides a convenient way to capture, parametrize, and re-unify the growth among code variants. Optional, deep integration with numpy and PyOpenCL provides a convenient computing environment where the transition from prototype to high-performance implementation can occur in a gradual, machine-assisted form