SPACE TRANSPORTATION ANALYSIS & INTELLIGENT SPACE SYSTEMS

THE PROPOSED PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR (PI) FOR THIS PROJECT, DAN GREENWOOD, SERVED AS THE PI DURING THE PHASE-I SBIR: AUTOMATIC PERCEPTION FOR MISSION PLANNING AND FLIGHT CONTROL. THE PHASE-I WORK CULMINATED IN: 1) A BRIEFING ON ASURVEY OF NEURAL NETWORKS TO THE SPACE OPERATIONS, AUTOMATION AND ROBOTICS 1987 CONFERENCE AT NASA JSC, 2) A TECHNICAL REPORT DESCRIBING THE WORK OF THE WORLD'S LEADING NEURAL NETWORK RESEARCHERS, 3) A DATA BASE OF THE NEURAL NETWORK RESEARCH REPORTED IN 1985 TO 1987. THE PHASE-I WORK ALSO INCLUDED AN INVESTIGATION THE APPLICATION OF GENETIC ALGORITHMS TO PROGRAM A NEURAL NETWORK. THE PHASE-II RESEARCH PROGRAM, PROPOSED HEREIN, IS CONCERNEDWITH APPLYING THE RESULTS UNCOVERED DURING PHASE-I TO ACHIEVING THE MOST COST-EFFECTIVE AUTOMATION TO SUCH NASA MISSION CONTROL FUNCTIONS AS: FLIGHT PLANNING, DATA LOAD PREPARATION, PAYLOAD INTEGRATION, TRAINING AND SIMULATION, FLIGHT CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS AND TRACKING, AND POST-FLIGHTANALYSIS. NETROLOGIC WILL INVESTIGATE EACH OF THE MISSION CONTROL FUNCTIONS TO DISCOVER WHERE AND HOW NEURAL NETWORKS MAY BE APPLIED OR INTEGRATED WITH AI APPROACHES. PROOF OF CONCEPT EXPERIMENTS WILL BE CONDUCTED USING A NEUROCOMPUTER.