AUTOMATED ADVISERS FOR REMOTE SCIENCE EXPERIMENTATION

This article details flight results from the Principal Investigator (P I)-in-a-Box project. The project is an attempt to understand the issue s involved in building automated real-time advisory systems to improve the conduct of science in remote laboratory settings. This ir an impo rtant problem, as examples of these situations can be found throughout aerospace. A knowledge-bared approach is used to facilitate real-time reactions to experiment data as they are collected by a competent, bu t not expert, operator The system was flown on the Space Shuttle in Oc tober 1993. The PI-in-a-Box system was able to outperform humans in a variety of science-related tasks; including data integrity assurance, data analysis, and scientific model validation.