SOAR TECHNOLOGY, LLC — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: Z5

Description

Space operations are undergoing a paradigm shift towards persistent assets in space, supported by coordinated, adjustable human-robot partnerships. Such partnerships require enabling technologies which can: support co-design of reference missions, partner robots and novel human-robot teaming paradigms to assist in integrated mission planning and execution. To address these challenges, SoarTech, along with partner SimDynamX, propose Co-STAR (Co-design of Shared Tasking with human and Autonomous Robot teams), an innovative approach to human-robot teaming to support development and testing of integrated human-autonomous robot team mission planning and execution for persistent operations in space. Our toolset will include a cognitive autonomy architecture, alongside the task representation and concurrent analysis of robot capabilities within a reference space mission to facilitate the human-machine team. nbsp;The effort will focus on a reference mission to validate the approach and supporting tools. nbsp;Our approach is to augment and extend an existing flexible task representation, Hierarchical Task Network to support shared human-robot tasks and task allocation, augment and extend an existing SoarTech cognitive autonomy architecture to support seamless human-robot partnership, and develop a parametric capability analysis process, using an existing SDX high-fidelity simulation for collaborative space operations to assist in co-design of robot capabilities simultaneously with reference missions. nbsp;The result is a toolset that allows for the exploration of the aspects of human-autonomous robot partnerships and, and the supporting iterative design of missions and capabilities in support of actual operations.