NASA SBIR 2006 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Adventium Enterprises, LLC
111 Third Ave. S., Suite 100
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2551
(612) 720-4960

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Mark S. Boddy
mark.boddy@adventiumenterprises.com
111 Third Ave. S., Suite 100
Minneapolis, MN  55401-2551
(651) 442-4109

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT ( Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
This SBIR project will achieve trusted, reconfigurable, intelligent autonomy through system-level validation. The goal is to design and develop a representation and reasoning system for system-level verification and validation (V&V) of high-level autonomous control for complex systems operating in dynamic environments. Starting from component-level behavioral guarantees, the System-Level Autonomy Trust Enabler (SLATE) will reason about composition, abstraction, and embedding of system components, resulting in high-confidence guarantees of behavior for high-level autonomous control systems relevant to a wide range of NASA applications, including manned and unmanned spacecraft, rovers, and habitats. SLATE will support incremental computation of guarantees and the assumptions required, vastly simplifying the reconfiguration, upgrading, or retargeting of autonomous control systems. Phase I will provide a feasibility demonstration and evaluation of SLATE's representation and inference through application to a multi-level robotic control system, and identify the key features needed in an application-ready version of SLATE. Phase II will develop an application-specific version and provide a user interface, address performance and reasoning issues, and demonstrate operation on a representative NASA application.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS ( Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
SLATE has the potential to be useful on any NASA mission requiring some form of complex automation, whether or not the mission is manned. The initial application areas targeted will include 1) Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking (ARD) applications relevant to Mission to Mars, Mars Sample Return, Mini-AERCAM, Orbital Express (DARPA), and earlier programs such as DART, XSS-11 (AFRL), and Automated Transfer Vehicle and 2) Rover-based exploration, mapping, and resource extraction systems on the moon and Mars, or 3) other relevant application as directed by NASA.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS ( Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The potential design and V&V benefits of this SBIR extend beyond space-based systems to include other complex, high-value, life-critical control systems. Customers for such products or systems include military users of high autonomy systems, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAV), and especially UAV sensor platforms, which are moving into domestic arenas and so need to fly in national air space with correspondingly stringent V&V requirements. Other potential customers include airframe integrators and supporting vendors, US critical infrastructure owners with significant unattended operating requirements such as remote pumping and transfer stations, and requirements design and analysis vendors.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Architectures and Networks Attitude Determination and Control Autonomous Control and Monitoring Autonomous Reasoning/Artificial Intelligence Expert Systems Guidance, Navigation, and Control On-Board Computing and Data Management Operations Concepts and Requirements Software Development Environments Telemetry, Tracking and Control Testing Requirements and Architectures