Autonomous Asteroid Exploration by Rational Agents

The history of software agent architectures has been driven by the parallel requirements of real-time decision-making and the sophistication of the capabilities the agent can provide. Starting from reactive, rule based, subsumption through to layered and belief-desire-intention architectures, a compromise always has to be reached between the ability to respond to the environment in a timely manner and the provision of capabilities that cope with relatively complex environments. In the spirit of these past developments, this paper is proposing a novel "anthropomorphic" agent architecture that brings together the most desirable features: natural language definitions of agent reasoning and skill descriptions, shared knowledge with operators, the combination of fast reactive as well as long term planning, ability to explain why certain actions are taken by the autonomous agent and finally inherent formal verifiability. With these attributes, the proposed agent architecture can potentially cope with the most demanding autonomous space missions.