National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Small Business Innovation Research 2002 Program Solicitations

CHAPTER 9.2

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Topic 1: Information Technology
NASA Installation: Ames Research Center (ARC)

This NASA Center of Excellence for Information Technology is based on three cornerstones: Automated Reasoning for Autonomous Systems, Human-Centered Computing, and High Performance Computing & Networking. For this Solicitation, the focus is on software tools and methods to support these cornerstones. The target domains for these capabilities should be of high relevance to NASA. Primary areas of interest are as follows:

Technologies for Autonomous Spacecraft, Rovers, and Other Complex Systems

• An on-board capability for synthesizing operational plans from high-level goals, rather than from low-level sequences of actions sent by a ground operations team.
• On-board methods that use explicit component-based models to diagnose system health and then automatically re-configure to respond to failures.
• Integrated software capabilities that allow automated science rovers to respond to high-level goals such as "advance to a nearby interesting rock and analyze it." This could include perception of camera and other sensor data, position determination and path planning, science planning, and automated analysis of resulting science data.

• On-Board Real-Time Vehicle Health Management systems that perform quickly enough to monitor a flight control system (including spacecraft and fixed/rotary wing aircraft) in a highly dynamic environment, and respond to anomalies with suggested recovery or mitigation actions.
• Software generation tools which capture designer intent and performance expectations and that embed extra knowledge into the generated code for use by automated software analysis tools doing validation and verification, system optimization, and performance envelope exception handling.
• Application of automated reasoning and formal methods for high-assurance tools for program synthesis and program verification. Of special interest are tools for synthesis and verification of new kinds of software capabilities, including autonomy software, software that learns and adapts, and software for distributed systems such as air traffic control.

Technologies for Augmentation of Operations Performance

• Algorithms, software, and workflow processes that allow ground operations teams to perform at the same level with greatly reduced personnel, and to respond faster and better to any unexpected contingency.
• Tools that allow spoken language interaction with automated systems. Of special interest are tools targeted towards use by astronauts in an orbiting or planetary habitat as well as for interaction with planetary vehicles and science rovers.
• Innovative hardware and software systems that improve operator efficiency for tele-operating robotic systems via advanced displays, controls and telepresence interfaces as well as technologies to enhance teleoperations applications. Teleoperations, in this context, includes telerobotics, telescience, telepresence, and distributed collaborative virtual environments. Application areas include flight and ground operations development, analyses, training, and support.
• Innovative concepts for augmenting the simulation and 3-D visualization capabilities of advanced airport/ spaceport facilities like Future Flight Central (FFC) at Ames Research Center. Specific interest areas include 3-D visualization of aircraft noise, wake vortices, and dynamic weather conditions. Creative concepts that enable alternative uses of FFC-like facilities (e.g., aircraft carrier operation visualization) are also of interest.
• Advances in the ability of globally distributed control centers to cooperate in the control of fleets of spacecraft or multiple satellites occupying the same orbital slot.

Technologies for High Performance Computing and Networking

• Technologies to monitor the resources and services that make up a large-scale, heterogeneous, distributed computation system (a computational grid, or Grid), analyze the operation of such a system, and attempt to automatically resolve failures of the system.
• Capability-based authorization and access control techniques based upon public key cryptography to allow users to gain access to Grid resources and services.
• Techniques for efficiently scheduling scientific applications on the many high-performance com-puters that make up a Grid.
• Techniques for scheduling simultaneous access to Grid resources such as instruments, networks, storage systems, and computer systems. These techniques should maximize Grid resource utiliza-tion and minimize the amount of time applications wait for resources.
• Grid portal technologies that implement single sign-on access to Grid resources, and Grid problem solving environment (PSE) technologies, which provide a single interface for access to and inter-action with problem-specific data, computation codes, data analysis codes, and visualization/steering codes.
• Integration of Web Services with Grid Services and portals using WSDL, UDDI, WSI, and WSFL.
• Advancements in Grid based global file systems.
• Techniques to execute application workflows on Grids.

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