Marshal: Maintaining Evolving Models

SIFT proposes to design and develop the Marshal system, a mixed-initiative tool for maintaining task models over the course of evolving missions. SIFT will demonstrate Marshal by developing it as a plugin for the TRACLabs PRIDE procedure authoring system. A Marshal-enabled PRIDE will learn and maintain task models so that it can improve the consistency and correctness of PRL-based procedures. Marshal will monitor procedures as they are authored in PRIDE, learning organizational conventions and commonly applied constraints. Marshal will enhance the PRIDE interface with dialogue elements that highlight potential errors and unconventional elements in the current procedure. Marshal will allow model drift by adapting its model of procedures over time and it will accommodate incomplete and inconsistent feedback from procedure authors. Marshal's capabilities will stem from how it represents and reasons with a family of possible procedure model interpretations. As authors use different procedure constructs, Marshal will create interpretations of constraints that match the constructs. With author feedback, Marshal will update the interpretations to more closely match the corpus of procedures authored by the organization. With a family of model interpretations, Marshal can compute the expectation that user procedures are correct and consistent. Marshal also computes diagnoses explaining which assumptions about the user's intended model lead to inconsistency. From the diagnoses, Marshal populates a queue of potential plan flaws that the author can address at their convenience through natural and informative dialogues. As users interact with Marshal, it automatically maintains procedure models so that they can better serve procedure authors as missions evolve.

We will target Marshal as a key technology for handling evolving and changing task models for all NASA missions. Many NASA missions evolve and grow as they are occurring. For instance, the Mars Exploration Rover mission has expanded greatly beyond its original mission parameters. As a general-purpose model evolution tool, Marshal will be capable of handling complex domain constraints in such domains. Marshal has high applicability to analog missions where operations methodologies are evolved (i.e., Desert RATS and NEEMO). Further, any mission for geologic centric (i.e., planetary surface or asteroid) exploration and ISS crew planning will require occasional on-the-fly modification of procedures and tasks. Finally, as the possibility of long distance spaceflights draws ever closer, NASA will require technologies capable of duplicating or replacing current ground control tasks. We will work toward making Marshal a viable candidate for increasing the autonomy of astronauts during these flights.

We will develop Marshal technologies to be applicable across a variety of domains, beyond those at NASA. At SIFT, we have extensive knowledge in planning and scheduling for in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), satellites, and ground troop movements. These domains touch on a range of organizations, including the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the Office of Navel Research (ONR) and the Army Research Laboratory (ARL).

This is a mature technology (TRL 7) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.