NASA New Millennium Deep Space 1

First Autonomous System in Space (1999)

In 1999 NASA flew an experimental spacecraft the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX) with 13 new technologies including those related to propulsion, navigation, imaging and autonomous control. The Remote Agent Experiment (RAX) demonstrated for the very first time time closed loop control, with automated planning/scheduling, plan execution and fault protection all embedded on the spacecraft hardware 65 Million miles from earth. On May 19th, 1999, the RAX took control of the spacecraft and demonstrated these key concepts behind autonomous control and successfully demonstrated to the agency and the scientific community the viability of embedded autonomous control, especially related to generating courses of action which had not been pre-programmed a priori. RAX was significant not only to the space agency in demonstrated what “autonomy” implied, but also to the academic community in how automated planning can actually have an impact to real-world applications.

For his efforts, Kanna was awarded the NASA Public Service Medal.

Publications

A.K. Jónsson and P. Morris and N. Muscettola and K. Rajan and B. Smith, Planning in Interplanetary Space: Theory and Practice, Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS), 2000 cite

K. Rajan and D. Bernard and G. Dorais and E. Gamble and B. Kanefsky and J. Kurien and W. Millar and N. Muscettola and P.P. Nayak and N. Rouquette and B. Smith and W. Taylor and Y. Tung, Remote Agent: An Autonomous Control System for the New Millennium, Proceedings Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems, European Conf. on AI, 2000 cite

D. Bernard and G. Dorais and E. Gamble and B. Kanefsky and J. Kurien and W. Millar and N. Muscettola and P.P. Nayak and K. Rajan and N. Rouquette and B. Smith and W. Taylor and Y. Tung, Remote Agent Experiment: Final Report, whitepaper, 2000 cite

D. E. Bernard and G. A. Dorais and C. Fry and E.B. Gamble Jr. and B. Kanfesky and J. Kurien and B. Millar and N. Muscettola and P.P. Nayak and B. Pell and K. Rajan and N. Rouquette and B. Smith and B.C. Williams, Design of the Remote Agent experiment for spacecraft autonomy, Proceedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conf., 1998 cite

Smith, Benjamin D and Rajan, Kanna and Muscettola, Nicola, Knowledge acquisition for the onboard planner of an autonomous spacecraft, Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management, pp. 253--268, 1997 cite