NASA STTR 2008 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (SBC):		RESEARCH INSTITUTION (RI):
NAME:	Traclabs, Inc.	NAME:	Carnegie Mellon University - Silicon Valley
STREET:	8620 N. New Braunfels, Suite 603	STREET:	NASA Research Park, Bldg 23
CITY:	San Antonio	CITY:	Moffett Field
STATE/ZIP:	TX  78217 - 3586	STATE/ZIP:	CA  94305 - 1000
PHONE:	(210) 822-2310	PHONE:	(650) 335-2823

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Debra Schreckenghost
schreck@traclabs.com
8620 N. New Braunfels, Suite 603
San Antonio, TX 78217 - 3586
(832) 415-0109

Expected Technology Readiness Level (TRL) upon completion of contract: 2 to 3

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Intelligent robots for planetary exploration produce a wealth of information – both science data collected by the robots and data about remote robotic operations. The management and analysis of this data provides unique opportunities as well as significant challenges for both science and rover operations, including understanding and summarizing what data have been collected and using this knowledge to improve data access. TRACLabs proposes to develop software for automatically building semantic summaries of data and images collected by remote rovers and using this information to retrieve subsets of this information for manipulation and visualization. We will use these semantic summaries to construct scripts for spatial and event-based data retrieval (e.g., retrieve data collected at a location). This ability to retrieve and manipulate a subset of data relevant to a situation of interest will be used to provide details on demand displays as well as support data exploration starting from a situation or event. Semantic interpretation has focused on document interpretation and database indexing while the proposed approach provides in-line semantic annotation and summarization of data streams. TRACLabs and its partner Carnegie Mellon University bring extensive experience in advanced software development and rover operations enabling integrated software solutions for NASA's planetary exploration.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
NASA's exploration and scientific missions will produce terabytes of information. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter alone has collected over 1.7 terabytes of data. As NASA enters a new phase of space exploration, managing large amounts of scientific and operational data will become even more challenging. Rovers conducting planetary exploration will produce data for selection and preparation of exploration sites. Uncrewed rovers and space probes will collect scientific measurements and images to improve our understanding of the solar system. Satellites in low Earth orbit will collect data for monitoring changes in Earth's atmosphere and environment. The proposed software for context aware data manipulation is applicable to all these NASA applications. It provides data synopses that aid understanding the contents of archives and supports spatial and event-based retrieval to improve data access. The use of a consistent vocabulary for both summarization and retrieval assists exploring similarities and trends among data from multiple missions.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The need for effective manipulation of large amounts of data is a recurring need in a diverse set of applications.

Military: The military is investigating unmanned vehicles for surveillance and reconnaissance, which will produce large amounts of information. Operations with unmanned vehicles require fusing and managing multiple concurrent sources of information. The proposed software can support operations personnel in manipulating the information collected during such operations.

Chemical and Nuclear: The operation of chemical and nuclear plants produces data for tracking resources, monitoring system health, and diagnosing problems. The proposed software can help operators find and utilize information relevant to ongoing operational situations.

Health: Home instrumentation can improve independence of function for the aging and cognitively impaired by enabling human performance monitoring. Clinicians and caregivers review performance data to determine the effectiveness of cognitive aids. Tools are needed to manipulate the data collected when performing the activities of daily living.

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

Autonomous Reasoning/Artificial Intelligence Database Development and Interfacing Human-Computer Interfaces Human-Robotic Interfaces