Failure Detection, Isolation and Recovery system concept for the European Robotic Arm

Currently Fokker Space B.V. is developing the European Robotic Arm (ERA) under contract of the European Space Agency (ESA). ERA's main mission is the assembly and servicing of the Russian Segment of the International Space Station Alpha. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the safety requirements, given the specific possibilities and...

Pilot performance in automated cockpits: a comparison of moving and nonmoving thrust levers

Two different design-philosophies with respect to the Man-Machine Interface of current auto thrust systems were compared in a flight simulator study. With the so-called moving thrust lever concept, the positions of the thrust levers are servo-controlled by the auto thrust system. Hence, the thrust levers provide the pilot with additional...

KADAM knowledge-based assistant for diagnosis in aircraft maintenance: Final report

Under contract with the Netherlands Agency for Aerospace Programs (NIVR), the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR has investigated the feasibility of knowledge-based systems to assists ground crews in corrective maintenance of complex aircraft systems. For this feasibility study, the Fokker airconditioning system was chosen as a representative...

How to reason with uncertain knowledge

In this paper two kinds of uncertainty, general and specific uncertainty, are distinguished. General uncertainty denotes an uncertainty about which objects of a class belong to a relation. Sentences in which it occurs can be view as describing incomplete knowledge. An example of such a sentence is: "Most humans have brown eyes". Specific...