Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Maintains overall cognizance of
spacecraft health and safety
conditions. Can manage other
agents in the community.
Space-based
Autonomy
AGENT
Spacecraft
State
Maintains closed-loop monitoring
and control of spacecraft
subsystems. Provides information to
the Spacecraft State Agent
AGENT
AGENT
Spacecraft
Subsystem
Management
AGENT
Instrument
Management
Tape
Recorder
Provides science
data management
(collection, storage,
transmission)
On-Board Agent Community
Responds either to pre-planned high-level
science agend as and/or goal-directed
commands from the earth-based PI
New agent to be
integrated into
the spacecraft
community of
agents
Ground-based
Autonomy
Agent
Agent-based
Support for
Spacecraft Operations
Ground-based
Spacecraft
Subsystems'
Monitoring Node
Agent autonomy
supports
independence and
non-deterministic
behaviors
Telemetry/
Command
Data
Source
?
Data
Source
Agent
Agent's
persistence
supports
extended system
monitoring
actions
Network
Agent
Agent
Migration
Path
Agent Migration
supports load
balancing among
processing nodes
Agent Spawning/Cloning
to support “Parallel”
Processing and Fault
Tolerance
Other User Sites
Agent
Development
- currently active agent
Community of Domain Specialist Agents
User-System
Interactions via
Typed or Spoken
Natural
Language,
Graphical Menus
or Structured
Queries
- temporary location of agent
- agent communication
- agent migration path
User
Interface Agent
Community
MAS -
Multi-Agent
System
User Site
- information/process
- information source
- interface agent
Fig. 9.5.
Progressive autonomy of a spacecraft
There are three levels represented in the figure:
1.
An agent development component
2.
A ground-based autonomy component
3.
A space-based autonomy component
Agents can migrate from one level to the next depending on their degree of
development and validation. Communication between agents on the different
levels facilitates the development and validation of agents, since the agents
