A step towards an autonomous planetary rover

Abstract

Recently, significant advances have been made in enabling autonomous rovers and robotic vehicles. Current robotic vehicles employ significant elements of autonomy in their low-level operations and control. A further important step is the integration of high-level intelligent systems with autonomous rover control architectures. In this paper, we describe the integration of two software systems: ASPEN (Automated Scheduling and Planning ENvironment) and WITS (Web Interface for TeleScience). WITS provides a high-level graphical interface to Rocky7, an experimental rover developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Using WITS, a user can naturally specify science activities and locations using actual images of the rover’s environment. ASPEN accepts the science goals input using WITS, reasons about the low-level activities and resources required to achieve these goals, and generates the executable sequence to enable achievement of the requested goals. Future steps would include a migration of this software to the rover itself, allowing the rover to schedule its own activities, and thus behave more autonomously.