Links about DART and Deepspace planning applications

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

I mentioned two "high profile" planning applications in today's class.

DART was a logistics planning/replanning tool that was apparently used in 
first Iraq war. The then DARPA director has been
quoted as saying that the success of this one tool and the money it saved 
more than justified all the funding DARPA put into automated planning
(then again, these are the 16,000$/toilet folks ;-)

A magazine writeup on DART is available at 
http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/dart-mag.pdf

======

RAX--remote agent experiment--was done to see if an automated planner can 
take charge of the mission control of a space craft.
They did an actual hands-on experiments with DeepSpace 1 spacecraft in 
1999. It was a big deal for planning folks, and it increased NASA's interest
in supporting automated planning research. See 
http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/1999/99images/remoteagent_ds1/raxpix.html
for a blurb from 1999 about RAX experiment.


A shorter easier to read demo description paper is at 
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/629659.html

A technical paper on RAX planner (HSTS) is at 
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/people/jonsson/Papers/aips00.ps

=========

A more recent use of planning techniques in NASA is to guide Spirit and 
Opportunity. No paper on this stuff is written yet, but a talk abstract
by Kanna Rajan is at 
http://isandtcolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/fall2004/speakers/rajan.html
(I am trying to see if I can get him to come and give a talk here.)

rao