Autonomous systems intelligence

Abstract

The evolution of unmanned and manned spacecraft indicates that significant degrees of autonomous operation for onboard health, fault, or performance management are becoming important. In particular, technology and mission studies of a permanently manned, evolutionary space station have surfaced the need for new computer system concepts incorporating autonomy and perhaps artificial (machine) intelligence. An evolving autonomous system with mixed degrees of autonomy, interdependent autonomous functions, and perhaps disparate artificial intelligences will require orchestration of the behavior of the entire system. An advanced concept of decision control, involving an explicit sequence of goal-directed decisions, is proposed as an executive machine-intelligent process by which the multiple, specialized “smart programs” or “machine intelligences” of an autonomous system could be controlled.