5 November 1998

SCS Researcher Helps Build Software to Guide Future Spaceships

While much of the world was preparing to watch Senator John Glenn's return to space, School of Computer Science Senior Research Scientist Reid Simmons and his family were watching the Cape Canaveral launch of Deep Space 1.

Deep Space 1, which lifted off on Saturday, October 24, is the first launch of NASA's New Millennium program, which focuses on a new breed of spacecraft that~s smaller, cheaper and more autonomous than those of the past. It's also a program that concentrates on testing new spaceship technologies rather than science. Nearly a dozen items will be tested on this mission, including a new ion propulsion system, which is reminiscent of ideas that appeared in science fiction stories written many years ago.

For the past three years, Simmons has been participating in the New Millennium program with colleagues at NASA's Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which heads the project. They were asked to help formulate a vision of where spacecraft software should be going in the next 10-15 years. Their work has resulted in what Simmons calls the "Remote Agent Program," which if all goes well, will be uploaded to the spacecraft and used in a two-week autonomous experiment. During the experiment the software will plan, execute and monitor the spacecraft's movements.

Simmons said the new program represents a big change for NASA. "This program aims toward developing a spacecraft that can determine its direction, diagnose its ills and heal itself, rather than obeying orders from ground controllers," he said.

Simmons' contributions to the Remote Agent software are based on a unique software control system called Task Control Architecture (TCA). He developed TCA for the groundbreaking Ambler robot, a 12-foot-tall, six-legged walker developed for NASA, that made its debut at Carnegie Mellon in 1990. It was the first of a new generation of robots that can explore and operate in natural terrain. TCA was also used in the Tessellator, which was developed here to inspect the tiles on the Space Shuttles, and Ratler, a predecessor of Nomad, a wheeled robot now in Antarctica being groomed to search for Martian meteorites. TCA is also critical to the capabilities of Xavier, a self-navigating robot that can be seen almost daily wandering through the corridors of Wean Hall, talking to itself and telling knock-knock jokes.

Simmons is working with his colleagues in the New Millennium program to develop tools that will be used to visualize data sent from a spacecraft back to Earth. He is also working with SCS Fore Systems Professor Edmund Clarke and his group to do formal verification of software in spacecraft systems.

The Deep Space 1 journey, which will climax with an asteroid fly-by in the summer of 1999, is the first in a series of missions. Others include a Mars probe, scheduled to launch in December, and a test using multiple spacecraft to perform wide baseline inferometry, which will allow astronomers to see further and more clearly into space.

Return to: SCS News Releases
SCS-Today
School of Computer Science homepage

This page maintained by copetas@cs.cmu.edu.