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Mudd Talks: Artificial Intelligence: Powering Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars



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Jeremy Frank POM '90 discusses how NASA’s Autonomous Systems and Operations (ASO) project develops and demonstrates numerous autonomy enabling technologies employing artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. This work has employed AI in three distinct ways to enable autonomous mission operations capabilities. Crew autonomy gives astronauts tools to operate space vehicles or systems without assistance from Mission Control. Vehicle system management uses AI techniques to turn the astronaut's spacecraft into a robot, allowing it to operate when astronauts are not present or to reduce astronaut workload. AI technology also enables autonomous robots to act as crew assistants or proxies when the crew are not present. In this talk, Frank discusses human spaceflight mission operations functions and classify these functions as monitoring, planning, plan execution and fault management. He describes the AI techniques behind each of these demonstrations, which include a variety of symbolic automated reasoning and machine learning based approaches. He concludes with a description of several demonstrations of these capabilities motivating future development needs for AI to enable NASA's future exploration missions.

Mudd Talks is a virtual discussion series offered by the Harvey Mudd College Office of Alumni and Parent Relations. Opinions expressed in the Mudd Talks discussion series are those of the individual speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the College administration, faculty, trustees or students.
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Management
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