NASA is developing increasingly autonomous systems that can perform missions with a high degree of certainty with minimal human intervention. Examples of such mission include rovers operating in Mars, where the missions are extremely long, and therefore multiple components and subsystems will degrade and fail over the duration of the mission. However, due to the long communication delays between Mars and Earth, these systems cannot be monitored and diagnosed by mission control like any other near-earth mission. The proposed capability will be invaluable to NASA for such operations by (a) Predicting failures before they disrupt the mission, (b) Reducing false positives of such prediction with the proposed inference engine under multiple failure scenarios, and (c) merging multiple recovery procedures that may have conflict. This will enable NASA to fill the gap between the current flight avionics CW FDIR systems and desired ISHM systems handling multiple failure high stress situations.
Among the other agencies, DoD, US Air Force, US Navy, and commercial aviation (e.g., SpaceX) are the most potential customer for the resulting technologies. Large scale military systems (systems of systems) such as NORAD, Space Command ground segments, the Joint Strike Fighter fleet, the Navy shipboard platforms, Submarine Commands and ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems can be potential areas to field the proposed technology. In addition, UAVs, UMGs and other unmanned submersible vehicle markets could also be potential target for the proposed technology. The product is also expected to be of commercial value to the manufacturers of DoD and military?s remotely guided weapons and reconnaissance systems.
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