Machine Intelligence And Autonomy For Aerospace Systems

After a brief historical overview, chapters discuss the implications of a 1985 Congressional mandate to advance automation and robotics for the Space Station program, the human in the control loop, and special advanced artificial intelligence areas related to the autonomous, operational aspects of s

Provides the aerospace researcher and the practicing aerospace engineer with insight into the latest innovative methods and approaches regarding intelligent and autonomous aerospace systems. Coverage includes Intelligent Space Systems, Intelligent Validation and Verification Methods, Intelligent Health Monitoring, and Intelligent Flight Control.

Research advances in embedded computational intelligence, communication, control, and new mechanisms for sensing, actuation, and adaptation hold the promise to transform aerospace. The result will be air and space vehicles, propulsion systems, exploration systems, and vehicle management systems that respond more quickly, provide large-scale distributed coordination, work in dangerous or inaccessible environments, and augment human capabilities. Advances in Intelligent and Autonomous Aerospace Systems seeks to provide both the aerospace researcher and the practicing aerospace engineer with an exposition on the latest innovative methods and approaches that focus on intelligent and autonomous aerospace systems. The chapters are written by leading researchers in this field, and include ideas, directions, and recent results on intelligent aerospace research issues with a focus on dynamics and control, systems engineering, and aerospace design. The content on uncertainties, modeling of large and highly non-linear complex systems, robustness, and adaptivity is intended to be useful in both the sub-system and the overall system level design and analysis of various aerospace vehicles.A broad spectrum of methods and approaches are presented, including: * Bio-Inspiration * Fuzzy Logic * Genetic Algorithms * Q-Learning * Markov Decision Processes * Approximate Dynamic Programming * Artificial Neural Networks * Probabilistic Maps * Multi-Agent Systems * Kalman, particle, and confidence filtering

In the early 1990s, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center started researching and developing autonomous and autonomic ground and spacecraft control systems for future NASA missions. This research started by experimenting with and developing expert systems to automate ground station software and reduce the number of people needed to control a spacecraft. This was followed by research into agent-based technology to develop autonomous ground c- trol and spacecraft. Research into this area has now evolved into using the concepts of autonomic systems to make future space missions self-managing and giving them a high degree of survivability in the harsh environments in which they operate. This book describes much of the results of this research. In addition, it aimstodiscusstheneededsoftwaretomakefutureNASAspacemissionsmore completelyautonomousandautonomic.Thecoreofthesoftwareforthesenew missions has been written for other applications or is being applied gradually in current missions, or is in current development. It is intended that this book should document how NASA missions are becoming more autonomous and autonomic and should point to the way of making future missions highly - tonomous and autonomic. What is not covered is the supporting hardware of these missions or the intricate software that implements orbit and at- tude determination, on-board resource allocation, or planning and scheduling (though we refer to these technologies and give references for the interested reader).

"A follow-on volume to Advances in Intelligent and Autonomous Aerospace Systems (AIAA, 2012), Advances in Computational Intelligence and Autonomy for Aerospace Systems seeks tp provide both the aerospace researcher and the practicing aerospace engineer with further insight into the latest innovative methods and approaches regarding intelligent and autonomous aerospace systems."--Page [4] of cover.