Jason Furtado

S.B. Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, MIT
MEng Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, MIT (expected June 2008)
Draper supervisor: Lauren Kessler

For his Master’s theses research, Furtado is helping to design the Human Interactive Mission Manager (HIMM) which merges the fields of human supervisory control and intelligent autonomous systems. The objective is to enable dynamic participation in real-time mission planning. This project builds upon Draper’s ADEPT architecture developed for intelligent autonomy and introduces human interaction capabilities at various levels of the hierarchy.

While ADEPT has been successfully applied to unmanned air, undersea, and space vehicles, the HIMM’s capabilities will be demonstrated as part of a crewed lunar landing system which faces such challenges as high precision landing on any region of the moon and under any lighting conditions. With demands that far exceed those of the Apollo missions, lunar landing systems for future missions need to become more automated and thus more complex to provide astronauts with sufficient information to keep them in-the-loop and prepared to detect and respond to anomalies.

Furtado’s research is focused on the design and software implementation of the ADEPT based mission manager that can support a human supervisory control level of interaction with the software. This design will enable mission designers to give a human operator the awareness and input into the decision making of an intelligent autonomous system. The generalized interaction mechanisms Furtado develops will advance the range of missions and domains that ADEPT implementations can be utilized to control.