Task-level control refers to the integration and coordination of planning, perception, and real-time control to achieve given high-level goals. Autonomous mobile robots need task-level control to effectively achieve complex tasks in uncertain, dynamic environments. This paper describes the Task Control Architecture (TCA), an implemented system that provides commonly needed constructs for task-level control. Facilities provided by TCA include distributed communication, task decomposition and...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), AUTOMATIC CONTROL, ROBOT CONTROL, ROBOTS, TASK PLANNING...
The AAAI Robot Challenge was established four years ago as a grand challenge for mobile robots. The main objectives of the Challenge are to (a) provide a task that will demonstrate a high level of intelligence and autonomy for robots acting in a natural, peopled, dynamic environment; (b) stimulate state-of-the-art robotics research to address this task; and (c) use robot demonstrations to educate the public about the exciting and difficult challenges of robotics research. When the Challenge was...
Topics: DTIC Archive, Simmons, Reid, CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA, *HUMANS, *INTERACTIONS, *ROBOTS,...
The long-term future of space exploration at NASA is dependent on the full exploitation of autonomous and adaptive systems: careful monitoring of missions from earth, as is the norm now, will be infeasible due to the sheer number of proposed missions and the communication lag for deep-space missions. Mission managers are however worried about the reliability of these more intelligent systems. The main focus of the workshop was to address these worries and hence we invited NASA engineers working...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), AUTONOMY, PROGRAM VERIFICATION (COMPUTERS), ADAPTIVE CONTROL,...
Efficiency and robustness are two desirable, but often conflicting, characteristics of problem solvers. This report presents an approach, called Generate, Test and Debug (GTD), that integrates associational and casual reasoning techniques to efficiently solve a wide class of interpretation and planning problems. The GTD paradigm generates an initial hypothesis using rules that associate features of the problem with events that can cause them. If the tester detects bugs in the hypothesis, it is...
Topics: DTIC Archive, Simmons, Reid G, MASSACHUSETTS INST OF TECH CAMBRIDGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LAB,...
Task Description Language (TDL) is an extension of the C++ programming language that enables programmers to quickly and easily write complex, concurrent computer programs for controlling real-time autonomous systems, including robots and spacecraft. TDL is based on earlier work (circa 1984 through 1989) on the Task Control Architecture (TCA). TDL provides syntactic support for hierarchical task-level control functions, including task decomposition, synchronization, execution monitoring, and...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), C++ (PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE), JAVA (PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE),...
To fulfill the needs of its deep space exploration program, NASA is actively supporting research and development in autonomy software. However, the reliable and cost-effective development and validation of autonomy systems poses a tough challenge. Traditional scenario-based testing methods fall short because of the combinatorial explosion of possible situations to be analyzed, and formal verification techniques typically require a tedious, manual modelling by formal method experts. This paper...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), COMPUTER PROGRAMS, AUTONOMY, PROGRAM VERIFICATION...
NASA spacecraft and robots operate at long distances from Earth Command sequences generated manually, or by automated planners on Earth, must eventually be executed autonomously onboard the spacecraft or robot. Software systems that execute commands onboard are known variously as execution systems, virtual machines, or sequence engines. Every robotic system requires some sort of execution system, but the level of autonomy and type of control they are designed for varies greatly. This paper...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), COMMAND GUIDANCE, NASA PROGRAMS, ROBOTICS, ROBOTS, SURVEYS,...
The CMU Planetary Rover project is developing a six-legged walking robot capable of autonomously navigating, exploring, and acquiring samples in rugged, unknown environments. To gain experience with the problems involved in walking on rugged terrain, a full-scale prototype leg was built and mounted on a carriage that rolls along overhead rails. Issues addressed in developing the software system to autonomously walk the leg through rugged terrain are described. In particular, the insights gained...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), COMPUTER PROGRAMS, NAVIGATION, ROBOT DYNAMICS, ROBOTS, ROVER...
To be truly useful, mobile robots need to be fairly autonomous and easy to control. This is especially true in situations where multiple robots are used, due to the increase in sensory information and the fact that the robots can interfere with one another. This paper describes a system that integrates autonomous navigation, a task executive, task planning, and an intuitive graphical user interface to control multiple, heterogeneous robots. We have demonstrated a prototype system that plans and...
Topics: DTIC Archive, Simmons, Reid, CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE,...
Plan execution is a cornerstone of spacecraft operations, irrespective of whether the plans to be executed are generated on board the spacecraft or on the ground. Plan execution frameworks vary greatly, due to both different capabilities of the execution systems, and relations to associated decision-making frameworks. The latter dependency has made the reuse of execution and planning frameworks more difficult, and has all but precluded information sharing between different execution and...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), PLANNING, LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING, ARCHITECTURE (COMPUTERS),...
In an attempt to solve as much of the AAAI Robot Challenge as possible, five research institutions representing academia, industry and government, integrated their research on a pair of robots named GRACE and GEORGE. This paper describes the second year effort by the GRACE team, the various techniques each participant brought to GRACE, and the integration effort itself.
Topics: DTIC Archive, Simmons, Reid, NAVAL RESEARCH LAB WASHINGTON DC CENTER FOR APPLIED RESEARCH IN...
An architecture is presented for controlling robots that have multiple tasks, operate in dynamic domains, and require a fair degree of autonomy. The architecture is built on several layers of functionality, including a distributed communication layer, a behavior layer for querying sensors, expanding goals, and executing commands, and a task level for managing the temporal aspects of planning and achieving goals, coordinating tasks, allocating resources, monitoring, and recovering from errors....
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), ARCHITECTURE (COMPUTERS), CONTROL SYSTEMS DESIGN,...
The Planetary Rover project is developing the Ambler, a novel legged robot, and an autonomous software system for walking the Ambler over rough terrain. As part of the project, we have developed a system that integrates perception, planning, and real-time control to navigate a single leg of the robot through complex obstacle courses. The system is integrated using the Task Control Architecture (TCA), a general-purpose set of utilities for building and controlling distributed mobile robot...
Topics: DTIC Archive, Simmons, Reid, CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA ROBOTICS INST, *COMPUTER PROGRAMS,...
The Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Interaction (P2P-HRI) project is developing techniques to improve task coordination and collaboration between human and robot partners. Our work is motivated by the need to develop effective human-robot teams for space mission operations. A central element of our approach is creating dialogue and interaction tools that enable humans and robots to flexibly support one another. In order to understand how this approach can influence task performance, we recently...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), HUMAN PERFORMANCE, ROBOTS, SPACE MISSIONS, COORDINATION,...
This paper explores representations used to reason about objects which change over time, and the processes which cause changes. Specifically, we are interested in solving a problem known as geologic interpretation. To help solve this problem, we have developed a simulation technique, which we call imaging. Imaging takes a sequence of events and simulates them by drawing diagrams. In order to do this imaging, we have developed two representations of objects, one involving histories and the other...
Topics: DTIC Archive, Simmons,Reid G, MASSACHUSETTS INST OF TECH CAMBRIDGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LAB,...
The Carnegie Mellon University Planetary Rover project is developing a six-legged walking robot capable of autonomously navigating, exploring, and acquiring samples in rugged, unknown environments. This report describes an integrated software system capable of navigating a single leg of the robot over rugged terrain. The leg, based on an early design of the Ambler Planetary Rover, is suspended below a carriage that slides along rails. To walk, the system creates an elevation map of the terrain...
Topics: DTIC Archive, Simmons, Reid, CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA ROBOTICS INST, *COMPUTER PROGRAMS,...
A report describes a rover-type robotic wheeled vehicle recently built for use as a testbed for development of software for future rover-type vehicles. This vehicle is a derivative of the Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) rover, which is a prototype Mars-exploration rover that also serves as a terrestrial testbed. The present vehicle was designed to be nearly functionally identical to the FIDO rover but to be built at much lower cost and to incorporate several improvements to...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), ROBOTICS, ROVING VEHICLES, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT,...
Version 2 of Closed Loop Execution and Recovery (CLEaR) has been developed. CLEaR is an artificial intelligence computer program for use in planning and execution of actions of autonomous agents, including, for example, Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna ground stations, robotic exploratory ground vehicles (rovers), robotic aircraft (UAVs), and robotic spacecraft. CLEaR automates the generation and execution of command sequences, monitoring the sequence execution, and modifying the command...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AUTONOMY, COMPUTER PROGRAMS, REAL...
Carnegie Mellon University has undertaken a research, development, and demonstration program to enable a robotic lunar mission. The two-year mission scenario is to traverse 1,000 kilometers, revisiting the historic sites of Apollo 11, Surveyor 5, Ranger 8, Apollo 17, and Lunokhod 2, and to return continuous live video amounting to more than 11 terabytes of data. Our vision blends autonomously safeguarded user driving with autonomous operation augmented with rich visual feedback, in order to...
Topics: NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION, COMPUTER...
