A Tool for Autonomous Ground-Based Rover Planning
Rob Sherwood, Andrew Mishkin, Tara A. Estlin, Steve Chien, Barbara E. Engelhardt, Brian Cooper, Gregg Rabideau · 2001
This paper discusses a proof-of-concept prototype for ground-based automatic generation of validated rover command sequences from high-level science and engineering activities. This prototype is based on ASPEN, the Automated Scheduling and Planning Environment. This Artificial Intelligence (AI) based planning and scheduling system will automatically generate a command sequence that will execute within resource constraints and satisfy flight rules. Commanding the rover to achieve mission goals requires significant knowledge of the rover design, access to the low-level rover command set, and an understanding of the performance metrics rating the desirability of alternative sequences. It also requires coordination with external events such as orbiter passes and day/night cycles. An automated planning and scheduling system encodes this knowledge and uses search and reasoning techniques to automatically generate low-level command sequences while respecting rover operability constraints, science and engineering preferences,and also adhering to hard temporal constraints.Enabling goal-driven commanding of planetary rovers by engineering and science personnel greatly reduccs the requirements for highly skilled rover