A KNOWLEDGE BASED SUPPORT TOOL FOR THE EARLY STAGES OF ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING DESIGN

A desire to produce a design support system for the early stages of electronic engineering design, has led to the conception of the Plymouth Engineer's Design Assistant (PEDA), pulling together experience from the three fields of computing, psychology and electronic engineering. The basic emphasis of this tool has been to use psychological techniques to analyze the cognitive aspects of designers in action and then make recommendations for design tool improvement. The results of the complementary psychological research, and other relevant literature are examined and potential avenues to realizing an improving design explored. A new idealized abstract representation of early electronic engineering is proposed, which is more in line witli the cognitive needs of designers, thus enabling the production of more capable design tools. The main points of the representation are discussed, and comparisons with other approaches and tools drawn. The abstract representation is then taken and used to form a specific implementation as the core to the PEDA tool. An overview of the PEDA tool is given, followed by a discussion regarding the important aspects of the implementation. Important issues and problems raised during the course of the research are discussed, together with suggestions for future work.THE UNIVERSITY OF READING and PLESSEY SEMI-CONDUCTORS, ROBOROUGH, PLYMOUT

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

Human-computer interaction in distributed supervisory control tasks

An overview of activities concerned with the development and applications of the Operator Function Model (OFM) is presented. The OFM is a mathematical tool to represent operator interaction with predominantly automated space ground control systems. The design and assessment of an intelligent operator aid (OFMspert and Ally) is particularly discussed. The application of OFM to represent the task knowledge in the design of intelligent tutoring systems, designated OFMTutor and ITSSO (Intelligent Tutoring System for Satellite Operators), is also described. Viewgraphs from symposia presentations are compiled along with papers addressing the intent inferencing capabilities of OFMspert, the OFMTutor system, and an overview of intelligent tutoring systems and the implications for complex dynamic systems

An overview of artificial intelligence and robotics. Volume 1: Artificial intelligence. Part B: Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging technology that has recently attracted considerable attention. Many applications are now under development. This report, Part B of a three part report on AI, presents overviews of the key application areas: Expert Systems, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Speech Interfaces, and Problem Solving and Planning. The basic approaches to such systems, the state-of-the-art, existing systems and future trends and expectations are covered

The 1988 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence

This publication comprises the papers presented at the 1988 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence held at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland on May 24, 1988. The purpose of this annual conference is to provide a forum in which current research and development directed at space applications of artificial intelligence can be presented and discussed. The papers in these proceedings fall into the following areas: mission operations support, planning and scheduling; fault isolation/diagnosis; image processing and machine vision; data management; modeling and simulation; and development tools/methodologies

NASA Tech Briefs, August 1992

Topics include: Electronic Components and Circuits; Electronic Systems; Physical Sciences; Materials; Computer Programs; Mechanics; Machinery; Fabrication Technology; Mathematics and Information Sciences; Life Sciences

NASA Tech Briefs, May 1990

Topics: New Product Ideas; NASA TU Services; Electronic Components and Circuits; Electronic Systems; Physical Sciences; Materials; Computer Programs; Mechanics; Machinery; Fabrication Technology; Mathematics and Information Sciences; Life Sciences

Proceedings of the NASA Conference on Space Telerobotics, volume 3

The theme of the Conference was man-machine collaboration in space. The Conference provided a forum for researchers and engineers to exchange ideas on the research and development required for application of telerobotics technology to the space systems planned for the 1990s and beyond. The Conference: (1) provided a view of current NASA telerobotic research and development; (2) stimulated technical exchange on man-machine systems, manipulator control, machine sensing, machine intelligence, concurrent computation, and system architectures; and (3) identified important unsolved problems of current interest which can be dealt with by future research