We discuss the development, integration, simulation, and flight test of a manned vehicle UAV mission system in a partially-known environment. The full control system allows a manned aircraft to issue mission level commands to an autonomous aircraft in realtime. This system includes a Natural Language (NL) Interface to allow the manned and unmanned vehicle to communicate in languages understood ...

Strict planetary protection practices are implemented during spacecraft assembly to prevent inadvertent transfer of earth microorganisms to other planetary bodies. Therefore, spacecraft are assembled in cleanrooms, which undergo strict cleaning and decontamination procedures to reduce total microbial bioburden. We wanted to evaluate if these practices selectively favor survival and growth of ha...

this paper presents a summary of the results from the simulation of a given two-stages production system which uses jit. the system consists of an assembly line with two automated assembly cells and two assembly stock points and one manufacturing cell with three manufacturing stock points for storing reserved parts and one receiving stock. carts with fixed capacity are used for handling the par...

Since the NASA space exploration roadmap has been oriented toward the “back to the Moon” paradigm in 2004, most space agencies (and ESA in particular) consider the Moon as the very likely next destination for human exploration of the solar system (Mars being obviously in line of sight). Planetary exploration endeavors in the solar system rely more and more on robotic tools and platforms, as pre...

The assembly line balancing problem is a non deterministic polynomial type planning problem for mass production. Layout design changes constitute a major decision that yields investment for assembly operations and numerous heuristics have been reported in the literature for solving the line balancing problems. U-shaped assembly layout offers several benefits over traditional straight-line layou...