NASA 1996 SBIR Phase I

PROJECT TITLE : Fault Detection, Diagnosis and Recovery For Autonomous Spacecraft

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)

JPL and ARC have requested, through topic 06.01, robust on-board fault detection, recovery and mission preservation. In order to support NASA's vision of small, low-cost autonomous spacecraft, it is necessary to migrate ground support functions, currently very costly in terms of bandwidth and ground personnel, to automated systems on-board the spacecraft. Health maintenance is a key candidate for this migration. This function typically requires significant communications bandwidth and a large number of highly trained ground support personnel. By using an innovative combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, we will produce an automatic, intelligent health maintenance system that will significantly increase spacecraft autonomy and dramatically reduce both of these costs. We will build on our current ground-based efforts at satellite unknown anomaly resolution. The goals of the Phase I research are to thoroughly define the health maintenance domain, elaborate the artificial intelligence techniques useful for automating the detection, diagnosis and recovery problems, prove the feasibility of these techniques through the development of a prototype, and develop a complete system specification for an on-board health maintenance system. Phase I research and prototype development will lay the groundwork for the Phase II implementation of an on-board system and eventual commercialization of the system.

The commercial applications of an automated spacecraft health maintenance system include commercial and military satellites and planetary science spacecraft. The technology might also be generalized and extended to other situations demanding vehicle autonomy, such as unmanned submersibles and planetary rovers.

Stottler Henke Associates, Inc.
2016 Belle Monti Avenue
Belmont, CA 94002