The Exploration Vision calls for closer cooperation between humans and robots than ever before. Creating robust robotic assistants, as well as making key spacecraft systems self sufficient, requires building systems that can adapt their behavior to environments that are complex, rapidly changing, and incompletely understood. Ames Research Center has unique expertise and agency leadership in applying autonomy to NASA missions, developing the individual technologies required, and integrating these pieces into autonomous systems for flight missions and terrestrial demonstrations.

Areas of research and development include adaptive control technologies, control agent architectures, embedded decision systems, evolvable systems, intelligent robotics, adjustable autonomy, distributed and multi-agent systems, goal-level commanding, and planning and scheduling.