Pete Bonasso, MSc
Pete Bonasso, MSc is a principal designer of the 3T intelligent control architecture, and a senior consultant for artificial intelligence and robotics in the Texas Robotics & Automation Center Laboratories (TRACLabs), in Houston, TX.
In November 2018, Peter and his team published results of their AI prototype simulation inspired by HAL 9000. They simulated the management of a planetary station, lasting four hours and the initial results were very promising. The CASE prototype (“cognitive architecture for space agents”) mimics HAL purely in a technological sense — i.e. minus the paranoia and betrayal.
Since 1995, Pete has investigated the application of 3T to NASA autonomous robots, such as the RMS Assistant and advanced life support monitoring and control, and that for a plant nutrient delivery system, an advanced air revitalization system (ARS), and an integrated water recovery system (WRS).
He developed the system planner for managing crew/plant gas exchange during a ninety-one day, human-rated Lunar-Mars Life Support Test. He has developed an automated RAPS to PRL translator for NASA’s A4O program, was the Principal Investigator on an SBIR to extend PRL (procedure representation language) to support planning operations, and is currently developing authoring systems to build space ontologies.
Pete has served on the program committees for the National AI Conference and the annual Agent Theory, Architectures, and Languages conference, and was the coorganizer of the first AAAI Mobile Robot Competition in 1992. He is also an editor of Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Robots, with David Kortenkamp and Robin Murphy, published by the MIT Press in 1998.
Pete was born in Frankfurt, Germany to an Army Major and his wife. He was appointed to the US Military Academy at West Point, New York because his enterprising father delivered flowers to an ailing Senator who had an at-large appointment available. After tours in Germany and Vietnam, graduate school at Stanford University, and several automatic data processing posts in the Army, he got out, taking computer jobs in the civilian world, finally landing at a job for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, programming space robots that he’s been at for the last twenty years.
Pete is also a Science Fiction, Action & Adventure writer. He published three books all available on Amazon.
He got the writing bug when he was in Vietnam, and enrolled in the Famous Writers School when he returned. But work, and a family of five kids, made him bury the bug. One night in 2003, while reading a paperback, he realized that he could do better than what he was reading, and decided to write stories and books he personally would enjoy. On a lark, he entered the Writer’s Digest short story contest and got an honorable mention (Eros Encoded in Tough Girls). Since then he’s written three novels, Portals, Outback Reckoning, The Angrelline, and a collection of short stories. He doesn’t plan on stopping as long as he can type on a laptop.
Pete earned his Bachelor’s degree of Science in engineering from the United States Military Academy, Westpoint, New York in 1968 and Master’s Degree of Science in computer utilization and operations research from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California in 1974.
Read the article about his AI System prototype: This HAL 9000-Inspired AI Simulation Kept Its Virtual Astronauts Alive. Read more about NASA SBIR/STTR Technologies.
Visit his ResearchGate profile and his profile at TRAClabs.
