Enhancing NASA's Procedure Representation Language to Support Planning Operations, Phase II

The military is currently a large customer for unmanned vehicle operations. Unmanned vehicles, both air and ground, are becoming more common in battlefield situations. In addition, Congress has mandated that one-third of all military vehicles must be unmanned by 2015. As these unmanned vehicles are increasingly deployed in tandem with dismounted forces coordinating software will be necessary to ensure successful operations. Procedures and mission planning play a large role in these kinds of operations. We also see a need for procedures and planning in operations such as refineries, chemical plants, nuclear and other power plants and any installation that has established standard operating procedures that must be carefully followed under often stressful situations, but whose procedures are currently paper, just like NASA's. Moving these industries to electronic procedures tied to system telemetry and integrated with planning will allow for more efficient and safer operations. We expect to tailor PRL and our PRL-related software to these industries and team with existing operators to evaluate and embed our software. Thousands of such facilities exist in the United States alone. Even with a small market penetration, TRACLabs Inc. will have significant revenues to invest in new products and services. Procedures are at the core of all NASA missions, especially human space missions. Mission planning is also at the core of all space missions due to the high cost of space assets such as astronauts, equipment and communication links. Our technologies will have applications across many NASA programs, from Mission Control to on-board NASA vehicles and outposts. We expect applications of our technology to immediately impact NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP). Two areas of ETDP will be immediate beneficiaries of this technology. First, the Centaur robot at NASA JSC is already using a preliminary version of PRL and a simple user interface to allow a remote supervisor to command the Centaur over a communication link. Our work will provide connection to automated planning technologies. Second, the Automation for Operations (A4O) project run out of NASA ARC is using PRL to enhance spacecraft operations. Our PRL extensions and planning technology would also be immediately applicable to spacecraft operations. We will work closely with representatives of both of these projects (Dr. Robert Ambrose at NASA JSC and Dr. Jeremy Frank at NASA ARC respectively) during Phase 1 to ensure our relevance to these two projects. More »