WINTERWINDS ROBOTICS INC — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: S5

Description

NASA has identified a real need to innovate fault management operational techniques. In particular, there is need for techniques that can enable greater autonomy in space missions, and to reduce the need to ldquo;saferdquo; a system in case of anomalous environmental or internal behaviour. Of particular importance is innovation that allows for a dramatic increase in the autonomy of robotics required to sustain and support human exploration/habitation of the moon and Mars.We propose to leverage a variety of causal inference techniques to optimize in-the-loop fault management operations in order to enable autonomous mobile robots operating in hazardous locations such as the moon and Mars. A major focus is to improve the Technical Readiness Level of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRrsquo;s)nbsp; that play a significant role in lunar ice water mining in the Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRrsquo;s) of the moon.Specifically, we propose a framework/methodology to automate the application of the Structural Causal Model (SCM) pioneered by computer scientist Judea Pearl in real-time and near real-time applications to improve AMR autonomy.