The TRAC mission manager autonomous control executive

Present autonomy technologies do not compensate for a vehicle's structural, perceptual and control limitations through reflexive responses and rapid adaptation as a pilot typically does. For Uninhabited Air Vehicles (UAVs) to have more general application the mishap rates must be much reduced. Therefore the vehicle control systems must be capable of rigorously analyzing and predicting in real-time, component failures and other disturbance effects to determine the appropriate response much as a pilot does. The purpose of the Reliable Autonomous Control Technology (REACT) program, a jointly-developed mission management architecture by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, General Electric, NASA Dryden, and Jet Propulsion Lab., is to autonomously accomplish this complex mission and subsystem management task. Based on prior analysis of recent UAV data, the Autonomous Control Executive (ACE) could play a role in preventing up to about 36% of these mishaps. We describe the ACE that would be part the Mission Management architecture and some initial results from rapid prototype of the architecture implemented using a PC based simulator.