NASA agents in space
One of the more impressive papers I attended at AAMAS’04 was presented by Steve Chien on the Earth Observing One satellite mission. The agent system on EO-1 has been allowed to control the satellite, run the scientific data capture instruments, and decide which data to discard and which to transmit back to the ground - fully closed loop. During his presentation, Steve said they had even more ambitious goals for the mission, including being able to run fully autonomously for days or weeks at a time. A NASA press release today indicates further progress to this goal. What makes this work really impressive is that the computer system running the satellite subsystems, planning missions and performing fault diagnosis and repair is significantly less powerful than the laptop I’m using at the moment.
[via KurzweilAI.net]