Research on advanced engineering software for in-space assembly and the manned Mars spacecraft

摘要

This report describes current and potential advanced software architectures to support space operations within the in-space assembly and manned Mars spacecraft domains. In particular, the purpose of this report is to define applications of a specific form of advanced software called intelligent communicating agents. Our approach was to first define the technological barriers to objectives within these domains and then to present potential advanced software solutions to those barriers including evaluation of intelligent communicating agents with respect to the specific domains. Our study has shown that advanced software applications for the in-space assembly domain are limited in the time frame of launching the first manned Mars spacecraft. This is partly due to the availability of Space Station personnel for performing assembly operations and due to the prohibitive cost of developing advanced robotic systems. In addition, the current level of sensor software and hardware technology was found to be too immature to support robotic applications for intelligent communicating agents.