Reminder: Seminar on Planning for MARS Rovers tomorow 11/10 in BY510

[Subbarao Kambhampati <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.