From Design Assistants to Design Peers: Turning Daphne into an AI Companion for Mission Designers

2019, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved. This paper describes the changes done to Daphne, a virtual assistant for architecting earth observing satellite systems, to turn it from a reactive assistant that only acts when asked by the user into a proactive assistant that can perform actions without not directly linked to a user request, taking its own initiative. Specifically, the paper describes a new way for Daphne to communicate with the user with Websockets that allows for a broader range of interactivity. The new features enabled by this new communication system are: (1) an agent that searches over the space of designs and shows interesting designs to the user; (2) an agent that tries to encourage the user to diversify their search of the tradespace; and (3) a live recommender system that acts when the user is modifying a certain design by suggesting changes that are likely to improve cost and/or performance. The paper also describes changes in the existing sub-systems as well as the interface to accommodate the new systems and interactivity. Finally, the paper has a short discussion on how a common user case scenario would unfold with all these new features.

From Design Assistants to Design Peers: Turning Daphne into an AI Companion for Mission Designers Conference Paper