Planning Applications for Three Mars Missions with Ensemble (original) (raw)
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Operating the Mars Exploration Rovers is a challenging, time-pressured task. Each day, the operations team must generate a new plan describing the rover activities for the next day. These plans must abide by resource limitations, safety rules, and temporal constraints. The objective is to achieve as much science as possible, choosing from a set of observation requests that oversubscribe rover resources. In order to accomplish this objective, given the short amount of planning time available, the MAPGEN (Mixed-initiative Activity Plan GENerator) system was made a missioncritical part of the ground operations system.
IRONCAP is an ESA study project to explore and define the concepts, techniques and interactions needed to plan and schedule the activities of an interplanetary rover. Its aim is to develop a prototype system to support the science and engineering planning activities of an interplanetary rover using state-of-the-art methods and techniques in planning and scheduling combined with existing and/or developing ground segment systems and technologies. The prototype will support the situational analysis of the rover and facilitate the planning and scheduling of activities/observation for the applicable autonomy levels, supporting the teams in their daily activities. As with any rover mission, situational assessment of the rover has to be performed to establish the context in which the planning of operations can be performed. This is performed on an engineering level and on a science level both with their own goals and objectives. Our paper will discuss this topic further and the issues between the two.
MEXAR2 – An Operational Tool for Continuous Support to Mission Planning
This paper describes MEXAR2, a software tool that is cur-rently used to synthesize the operational commands for data downlink from the on-board memory of the MARS EXPRESS spacecraft to the ground stations. In particular, the attention of this paper is focused on some features of the tool which show how AI techniques for planning, scheduling, domain modeling and intelligent interaction can be put into context in a challenging application environment. The design of the system is based on a first prototype, MEXAR, developed during a study performed before the launch of the MARS EXPRESS spaceprobe. The MEXAR2 tool has been successfully integrated in the overall mission planning process, and is in daily use by the Mission Plan-ning Team of MARS EXPRESS at the European Space Agency since February 2005.
Early Infusion of New Planning, Scheduling and Execution Technology into A Flight Mission
Space 2004 Conference and Exhibit, 2004
This extended abstract describes efforts to infuse new planning and scheduling technologies into the Mars Science Laboratory Mission (MSL), a NASA Mars rover mission planned for launch in 2009. Beginning in 2003, we engaged the MSL mission and the developers of the Mission Data System (MDS). MDS is a software system that at the time was the MSL software baseline for both the ground and flight system. We briefly describe the tools that we integrated with MDS, the analysis or experience on previous missions that suggested each tool, and our successes in integrating these tools into a proof-of-concept uplink system we demonstrated in late 2004. In 2004, MSL decided to fall back on the very successful Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission's software in order to save development cost, which has resulted in some redirection of our ongoing activities. We briefly describe our new work to enhance the MER-based MSL software.
Using Planning, Scheduling and Execution for Autonomous Mars Rover Operations
2015
With each new rover mission to Mars, rovers are traveling significantly longer distances. This distance increase raises not only the opportunities for science data collection, but also amplifies the amount of environment and rover state uncertainty that must be handled in rover operations. This paper describes how planning, scheduling and execution techniques can be used onboard a rover to autonomously generate and execute rover activities and in particular to handle new science opportunities that have been identified dynamically. We also discuss some of the particular challenges we face in supporting autonomous rover decision-making. These include interaction with rover navigation and path-planning software and handling large amounts of uncertainty in state and resource estimations. Finally, we describe our experiences in testing this work using several Mars rover prototypes in a realistic environment.
MrSPOCK: A long-term planning tool for MARS EXPRESS
IWPSS-09. 6th International …, 2009
This paper describes MrSPOCK (MARS EXPRESS Science Plan Opportunities Coordination Kit), a decision support system for long-term mission planning. The work was carried out within the Advanced Planning and Scheduling Initiative (APSI), a project funded by ESA which aims at creating the basis for a general, flexible and reusable software framework (named here APSI-TRF-APSI Timeline-based Representation Framework) to facilitate injection of AI Planning and Scheduling in space missions to enhance ESA mission operation management performance. The paper first overviews the framework features then shows them at work in supporting the realization of MrSPOCK. The paper shows how to solve an interesting multi-objective optimization problem requiring the satisfaction of various temporal and causal constraints. It then shows how the modeling capabilities of the APSI-TRF supports both the synthesis of an end-to-end approach to the problem, and open the possibility to flexible extensions of the application with added value in terms of modularity, extensibility and reusability. To this purpose, the main steps for the development of an extended application, which includes a model of the satellite power management subsystem are also described.
An Ad-hoc Planner for the Mars Express Mission
2013
Complete planning and scheduling of all spacecraft operations is a challenging area with the remote agent experiment at Deep Space 1 being a pioneering system. Still the complete approach is rare in practice. For example, in the Mars Express (MEX) mission, planning and scheduling techniques are used to solve some subproblems namely scheduling command upload and data download. In this paper we describe an approach to generate a complete schedule of the spacecraft that includes planning and scheduling of science, command uplink, data downlink, maintenance, and pointing operations. The proposed solving approach was designed to plan operations on the Mars Express (MEX) mission and it was motivated by the MEX challenge at the Fourth International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling. The method is based on incremental addition of operations to a partial schedule and modifying the time allocation of already scheduled operations to fit the newly added operation....