Autonomous Control of an In-Situ Propellant Production Plant

Operating an In-Situ Propellant Production (ISPP) plant on Mars poses significant challenges. One such challenge is the ability to maintain continuous plant operation without a Mars- based human presence, despite component failures and operational degradation. An Autonomous Controller (AC) can be used to monitor an ISPP plant for anomalous conditions, can diagnose component failures, and can provide recovery recommendations. The Livingstone system, developed at NASA Ames, is a model-based health management and control system that tracks the state of a device, detects and diagnoses anomalies and suggests alternative recovery actions. Livingstone is used at NASA Kennedy Space Center to develop an Autonomous Controller for ISPP. In turn, test and validation of the AC design is of critical importance and the employment of automated techniques of software verification and validation (V&V) to augment traditional scenario-based testing is desirable. This paper is in part based upon a more detailed discussion of ISPP and information technology by Gross et al. (2). The ISPP Test bed