Monitoring Vehicle Performance Over Time with a Knowledge-Based System

An experiment is underway to determine the feasibility of putting an expert system into an autonomous vehicle. A simple knowledge-based system has been implemented in LISP to aid in this experiment. The system (Pilot) presently runs on a VAX 11/780 computer. Field data collected by the EAVE-East vehicle has been run through Pilot in an effort to recognize trends in the data and reduce the volume of the data to manageable amounts. Preliminary results indicate that data trends can be recognized and recorded by the system. The system provides a method of computing such qualities as "sensor stability" and "position stability". By correlating "position stability" and "thruster effort" the system has been able to detect possible collisions with an underwater structure.