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Research Sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Sight, Sound & Motion
Dr. Ramin Roosta (Professor of Electrical Engineering, CSUN)
A great task is at hand, and that is to develop a Mission Manager for an Autonomous Air Vehicle (UAV). The role of Mission Manager will be to simply replace the pilot. Current UAV technology is limited, in that, these aircraft are not capable of executing a mission with full autonomy. What this basically means is human intervention is required when unexpected events occur, such as, loss of the navigational system. In this type of situation, a fully autonomous UAV would be capable of predicting this problem and taking appropriate measures to prevent it.
In order to accomplish this task, two development tools will be used. Gensym's G2 Application Development Tool is a complete development environment for creating and deploying intelligent real-time applications and Sight, Sound & Motion (SSM) "Flight Master Simulation and Visualization System". Before any development can begin, a Gateway Bridge was first built to provide real-time communication between the two.
Through a G2 Gateway bridge to an external system (SSM in this case), a G2 application can quickly obtain real-time data that it needs to make intelligent control decisions in a time-critical processing environment. The G2 application can also update the state of an external system - for example, by writing or updating a record in a database, or by controlling a PLC. A G2 Gateway bridge process and a G2 process run concurrently, enabling the G2 application to continue to perform its tasks while the G2 Gateway bridge manages the communication between G2 and an external system.
