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Reminder: Seminar on Planning for MARS Rovers tomorow 11/10 in BY510
- To: rao@asu.edu
- Subject: Reminder: Seminar on Planning for MARS Rovers tomorow 11/10 in BY510
- From: Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>
- Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 10:16:48 -0700
- Reply-to: rao@asu.edu
[Early birds get the famous raspberry bars...]
'Commanding Spirit and Opportunity: Lessons Learned from
deploying MAPGEN for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission'
Kanna Rajan
Autonomy & Robotics Area
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, California
Kanna.Rajan@nasa.gov
Date: November 10th, Time: 3:15-4:30pm Room: BY 510
Abstract:
---------
In September 2001, the MER mission chose to use MAPGEN, a ground
based decision-support system to help command Spirit and
Opportunity. On Jan 15th 2004, MAPGEN became the first AI based
system to actually command a vehicle on the surface of another
planet when the first surface plan for the Spirit rover was
successfully built radiated and executed on-board. This talk is
the tumultuous story of MAPGEN's infusion process and the lessons
we took away in doing so.
The Mixed-Initiative Activity Plan GENerator (MAPGEN) combines a
rich formalism of a flexible temporal constraint network with a
familiar front end used by mission operations personnel at JPL, to
command the two MER rovers. Mission operators with the help of
science personnel, use MAPGEN on the ground, on the two rovers to
build a complex conflict free plan that is packaged and uplinked
to command Spirit and Opportunity on the surface of Mars. This
generative planner, automatically enforces mission and flight
rules encased in a declarative model, as well as constraints
imposed to encode the scientific intent of the observations for
that Sol, requiring to being done on the surface of the Red
Planet. MAPGEN continues to be a part of the mission-critical
uplink command cycle for the Mars Exploration Rovers (see
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/story.php?sid=106&sec=space).
Bio:
----
Kanna is a Senior Research Scientist and a member of the
management team of the the Autonomy and Robotics Area at NASA Ames
Research Center Moffett Field, California. He is one of the
principals of the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX) which designed,
built, tested and flew the first AI based closed-loop control
system on a spacecraft. The RA was the co-winner of NASA's 1999
Software of the Year, the agency's highest technical award
(http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/remote-agent/).
His interests are in Planning/Scheduling, modeling and
representation for real world planners and agent architectures for
Distributed Control applications. Prior to joining Ames, he was in
the doctoral program at the Courant Institute of Math Sciences at
NYU. Prior to that he was at the Knowledge Systems group at
American Airlines, helping build a Maintenance Routing scheduler
(MOCA) which continues to be used by the airline 365 days of the
year.
MAPGEN has been awarded NASA's 2004 Turning Goals into Reality
award under the Administrators Award category, a NASA Space Act
Award, a NASA Group Achievement Award and a NASA Ames Honor Award.
Kanna is the recipient of the 2002 NASA Public Service Medal and
the First NASA Ames Information Directorate Infusion Award also in
2002. In Oct 2004, JPL awarded him the NASA Exceptional Service
Medal for his role in MER.
He is the Co-chair of the 2005 Intnl. Conference on Automated
Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), to be held in Monterey California
(http://icaps05.icaps-conference.org/) and the chair of the
Executive Board of the International Workshop on Planning and
Scheduling for Space.