Remote Agent: An Autonomous Control System for the New Millennium

On May 17th 1999, the Remote Agent (RA) became the first Artificial Intelligence based closed loop autonomous control system to take control of a spacecraft. The RA commanded NASA’s New Millennium Deep Space One spacecraft when it was 65 million miles away from earth. For a period of one week this system commanded DS1’s Ion Propulsion System, its camera, its attitude control and navigation systems. A primary goal of this experiment was to provide an on-board demonstration of spacecraft autonomy. This demonstration included both nominal operations with goal-oriented commanding and closed-loop plan execution, and fault protection capabilities with failure diagnosis and recovery, on-board replanning following unrecoverable failures, and system-level fault protection. This paper describes the Remote Agent Experiment and the model based approaches to Planning and Scheduling, Plan Execution and Fault Diagnosis and Recovery technologies developed at NASA Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.