PROPOSAL NUMBER: | 04-II X5.01-8382 |
PHASE-I CONTRACT NUMBER: | NNC05CA79C |
SUBTOPIC TITLE: | Mobile Surface Systems |
PROPOSAL TITLE: | Flexible and Safe Control of Mobile Surface Systems |
SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN
(Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
IA Tech, Inc.
10501 Kinnard Avenue
Los Angeles ,CA 90024 - 6017
(310) 474 - 3568
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER
(Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Kam S. Tso
tso@ia-tech.com
10501 Kinnard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90024 -6017
(310) 474 - 3568
TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
The primary innovation of this work is a novel approach for flexible and safe control of highly capable mobile surface systems, such as long-duration science rovers, crew surface systems, multi-robot and human-robot teams. The traditional approach of time-based sequence of commands will not be adequate for commanding and coordinating future mobile surface systems because it does not support concurrent tasks and team coordination. Those future systems will need more expressive executable plans, either uplinked from the ground or generated automatically onboard the spacecraft. The executive must ensure that the execution of commands and the response to the fault protection system conform to the pre-planned behavior.
A new execution language, called PLEXIL, has been designed specifically for flexible and safe command execution. The language is portable, lightweight, predictable, and expressive. The Phase II effort will focus on the development of the PLEXIL Executive System and Plan Editor. While the role of the Executive is to interpret and execute task plans according to the syntax and semantics of the PLEXIL language and ensures reliable and safe plan execution, the Editor facilitates the creation and editing of PLEXIL task plans.
POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
This research will result in an end-to-end system for visualizing, editing, analyzing, and executing robot task plans based on the PLEXIL language. As PLEXIL has a good potential to become the plan execution language for future Mars missions, the PLEXIL-based Executive and Editor will directly benefit future NASA lunar and planetary robotic missions. They will especially benefit the future Mars Scout missions as they are low-cost, innovative science missions that use new and creative concepts and a wide variety of mission types. The flexible and safe planning and control technologies can be easily adapted by those missions to meet their needs.
POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The resulting technologies are highly applicable to the area of industrial automation. In particular, the Editor and Executive together can provide an integrated solution for programming and control of industrial automation systems, from simple programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to large supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. The compact and expressive PLEXIL execution language that supports concurrent tasks, coordinated tasks, error monitoring and handling, can become a desirable high-level language for programming these PLCs and SCADA systems. Specifically, the PLEXIL Plan Editor will facilitate the programming of complex control tasks, and the PLEXIL Executive System will ensure reliable and safe task execution.