A step towards an autonomous planetary rover
Gregg Rabideau, Steve Chien, Paul Backes, G. Chalfant, K.S. Tso · AIP conference proceedings · 1999
Recently, significant advances have been made in enabling autonomous rovers and robotic vehicles. Current robotic vehicles employ significant elements of autonomy in their low-level operations and control. A further important step is the integration of high-level intelligent systems with autonomous rover control architectures. In this paper, we describe the integration of two software systems: ASPEN (Automated Scheduling and Planning ENvironment) and WITS (Web Interface for TeleScience). WITS provides a high-level graphical interface to Rocky7, an experimental rover developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Using WITS, a user can naturally specify science activities and locations using actual images of the rover’s environment. ASPEN accepts the science goals input using WITS, reasons about the low-level activities and resources required to achieve these goals, and generates the executable sequence to enable achievement of the requested goals. Future steps would include a migration of this software to the rover itself, allowing the rover to schedule its own activities, and thus behave more autonomously.