Enhancing NASA's Procedure Representation Language to Support Planning Operations, Phase I

Automation and autonomy are key elements in realizing the vision for space exploration. The NASA Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) has been developing a procedure representation language (PRL) that both captures the form of traditional procedures and allows for automatic translation into code that can be executed by NASA-developed autonomous executives. However, PRL is in a relative infancy with regard to supporting many of the autonomous software components being developed by NASA, specifically automated planners and schedulers. In this proposal we will design and test additional representations to PRL for resources, inter-procedure constraints and subprocedures so that automated planners can take better advantage of the PRL-generated procedures. The work plan includes developing scenarios and use cases, developing requirements for planning -- both manual and automated -- from the scenarios, developing XML tags for the PRL changes, testing the PRL enhancements in the use cases with robotic and life support simulations, and translating the changes into planning languages with proven semantics.

The military is currently a large customer for unmanned vehicle operations. Unmanned vehicles, both air and ground, are becoming more and more common in battlefield situations. Future Combat Systems (FCS) envision manned and unmanned vehicles of all sizes working side-by-side. In addition, Congress has mandated that one-third of all military vehicles must be unmanned by 2015. As these unmanned vehicles are increasingly deployed in tandem with dismounted forces coordinating software will be necessary to ensure successful operations. Procedures and mission planning play a large role in these kinds of operations. TRACLabs Inc. has an existing relationship with the Army's unmanned ground vehicle center at the TARDEC (Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center) facility in Warren Michigan. The Army has established a new Joint Center for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (JC-UGV) at TARDEC with a new Systems Integration Laboratory (SIL).

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.

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