Download pdf version - Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology ...

TransitionBriefs
Mission Effectiveness & Safety Assessment (MENSA)
Advanced Technology Laboratories • Electronic Systems Business Area
Vol. 1 No. 4

TransitionBriefs
Mission Effectiveness & Safety Assessment (MENSA)
A major challenge to the operation
of unmanned vehicles is the detection
and resolution of unexpected
events related to the vehicle’s mission.
The mission environment
rarely remains the same from conception
to execution. Similarly, the
vehicle changes as systems
degrade due to operational use.
The difference between success
and failure often relies on properly
and quickly identifying changes in
the environment and vehicle health
and then accurately assessing
their effect on operations.
Lockheed Martin Advanced
Technology Laboratories (ATL) developed
the Mission Effectiveness and Safety
Assessment (MENSA) technology under
independent research and development
and has transitioned it to multiple target
systems. MENSA is a contingency-monitoring
and plan-assessment architecture
that supports vehicle self-awareness with
respect to the vehicle’s ability to carry out
its missions.
Throughout a mission, MENSA monitors
system health-status indicators and
situation-awareness information to detect
conditions that will impact mission success,
such as degradations to the system’s
operational capabilities or the appearance
of pop-up threats. By raising the level of
monitoring and analysis to account for the
vehicle’s mission performance, MENSA
can focus operator attention on missioncritical
events, increasing the operator’s
situational awareness. Similarly, it can
support increased vehicle autononomy by
facilitating autonomous, dynamic replanning,
which is guided by its identification
of mission-plan dependency violations.
MENSA is an extensible architecture
that supports many design and integration
choices for specific unmanned applications.
It uses XML-based system workflows
and knowledge representations to
help construct applications in multiple
domains, though other representation and
reasoning mechanisms can be substituted
without affecting the overall architecture.
This approach allows MENSA to integrate
and use a wide range of assessment algorithms
in its operation.
Transition Successes
• Intelligent Control and Autonomous
Replanning of Unmanned Systems
(ICARUS). MENSA is part of a comprehensive
software solution to enable
intelligent, autonomous operation of
heterogeneous, unmanned, vehicle
teams that can readily transition at low
risk to current and future Naval
unmanned systems. Lockheed Martin
Aeronautics leads the program.
• KineForce Mission Management
system. MENSA provides the contingency
management component of the
KineForce Mission Manage-ment
system, which arose from the
Unmanned Combat Armed Rotorcraft
(UCAR) program led by Lockheed
Martin Systems Integration-Owego. The
mission management system is now
being used to demonstrate coordinated
mission execution among heterogeneous
teams of aircraft, including the
SilverFox, R-MAX, and Future Combat
System Class II/III aircraft.
• Real-Time MENSA for Unmanned
Aerial Systems. ATL supported the
construction of an embeddable, realtime
version of MENSA for integration
with unmanned aerial systems developed
by Lockheed Martin’s Advanced
Development Programs unit (Skunk
Works).
Contact:
Hugh Pearce
Advanced Technology Laboratories
856.792.9810
hpearce@atl.lmco.com