Advanced Autonomy for Rovers

Mission Statement

The overall objective of this project is to advance the state of the art in ground operations and onboard autonomy for flight rovers. The expected benfits are to enable increased rover productivity and science return without risk to rover safety and to support multi-rover missions and human presence on Mars. The primary near-term goal is to infuse the concept of contingent command sequence into rover flight operations.

Our initial testbed was the Marsokhod planetary rover (pictured above, left), and our technologies were demonstrated on this platform in the February, '99 Mojave field test. Our new testbed is a FIDO class rover, dubbed K9(pictured above, right), which was first demonstrated in a joint Ames-JPL field test in May, '00.

Point of Contact: John L. Bresina (jbresina@arc.nasa.gov)

Current Activities

Related Activities

Papers

Bresina, J.L. and Washington, R. 2001.
Robustness via Run-time Adaptation of Contingent Plans
In Proceedings of the AAAI-2001 Spring Syposium: Robust Autonomy.
Stanford, CA
A PDF version and a PostScript version of the symposium paper are available.
Bresina, J.L. and Washington, R. 2000.
Expected Utility Distributions for Flexible, Contingent Execution
In Proceedings of the AAAI-2000 Workshop: Representation Issues for Real-World Planning Systems.
Austin, TX
A PDF version and a PostScript version of the workshop paper are available.
Washington, R. and Bresina, J.L. 2000.
Utility Estimation for Contingent Execution: Preliminary Report
In Proceedings of the Second NASA International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space.
San Francisco, CA
A PDF version and a PostScript version of the workshop paper are available.
Washington, R. 2000
On-Board Real-Time State and Fault Identification for Rovers
In Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
A PDF version and a PostScript version of the conference paper are available.
Aycard, O. and Washington, R. 2000
State Identification for Planetary Rovers: Learning and Recognition
In Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
A PDF version and a PostScript version of the conference paper are available.
Bresina, J., Golden, K., Smith, D.E., Washington, R. 1999.
Increased Flexibility and Robustness for Mars Rovers
In Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation in Space.
ESTEC, Noordwijk, Netherlands
A PDF version and a PostScript version of the conference paper are available. A PDF version and a PostScript version of the presentation slides are also available.
Washington, R., Golden, K., Bresina, J. 1999.
Plan Execution, Monitoring, and Adaptation for Planetary Rovers.
In Proceedings of the IJCAI-99 Workshop, Scheduling and Planning meet Real-time Monitoring in a Dynamic and Uncertain World.
Stockholm, Sweden.
A PostScript version of the conference paper are available.
Washington, R., Golden, K., Bresina, J., Smith, D.E., Anderson, C., and Smith, T. 1999.
Autonomous Rovers for Mars Exploration.
In Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE Aerospace Conference.
Aspen, CO.
A PDF version and a PostScript version of the conference paper are available. A PDF version of the presentation slides is also available.
Bresina, J., Dorais, G., Golden, K., Smith D., and Washington R. 1998.
Autonomous Rovers for Human Exploration of Mars.
In Proceedings of the Mars Society Founding Convention.
Boulder, CO.
A PDF version and a PostScript version of the conference paper are available.

Current Personnel

Other Contributors

Alumni

Corin Anderson
Olivier Aycard
Ted Blackmon
Greg A. Dorais
Vineet Gupta
Gary Haith
Aaron Kline
Cesar Mina
Laurent Nguyen
Barney Pell
John Schreiner
Kurt Schwehr
Katherine Smith
Marion Smith
Hans Thomas
Brian Williams
Eric Zbinden

Collaborations

Postdoc page for Intelligent Robotics Group

Return to Autonomy & Robotics Area.


Computational Sciences Division	Information Sciences & Technology Directorate	NASA Ames Research Center	Center of Excellance for Information Technology	NASA

Last Updated: Mon Mar 19 18:59:40 2001
J.L. Bresina