Self-Awareness for Vehicle Safety and Mission Success

We present MENSA (Mission Effectiveness and Safety Assessment), a health monitoring and contingency resolution system architecture that supports unmanned vehicle self-awareness with respect to the vehicle's ability to carry out its missions. MENSA analyzes mission plans to identify required vehicle capabilities. Throughout the mission, MENSA monitors onboard sensors to diagnose faults and maps the vehicle's updated health status to its dynamic capabilities. By raising the level of monitoring and analysis to account for the vehicle's mission performance, MENSA can focus operator attention to mission-critical faults. Similarly, MENSA can support increased vehicle autonomy by facilitating autonomous dynamic replanning, which is guided by MENSA's identification of mission plan dependency violations.