Laura Plice
Papers
4
Total Citations
36
H-Index
4
About
Laura Plice is a systems engineer and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of mission operations, simulation infrastructure, and biologically-inspired autonomy for space exploration. She made significant contributions to NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, where she helped navigate the complex architecture, challenges, and anomalies that defined the mission’s success—a paper that has garnered 13 citations for its candid operational insights. Plice also advanced the development of the Mission Simulation Facility (MSF), a distributed simulation environment using High Level Architecture to support autonomy research for planetary rovers and aerial vehicles, a foundational tool cited 10 times. Her work extends to autonomous aerial explorers, where she tackled mission-representative imaging surveys and, notably, explored holarchical systems and emotional holons—biologically-inspired control architectures for aerial vehicles, drawing from the BEES for Mars project at NASA Ames. With a career bridging practical mission engineering and visionary bio-inspired design, Plice’s research continues to inform how we build resilient, autonomous systems for the next generation of planetary exploration.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Operating LADEE: Mission architecture, challenges, anomalies, and successes13 citations · 2015
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