On-board Planning for Robotic Space Missions using Temporal PDDL

Abstract

The desire for persistent autonomy in ambitious robotic space missions has seen renewed interest in the use of on-board planning. This poses particular challenges in terms of the limited computational power of radiation-hardened hardware, and also the need to integrate with functions external to the planner itself. In this paper, we discuss the development of a forward-chaining temporal planner for use in this setting. We present results illustrating its lightweight resource footprint compared to contemporary planners, and its application to two proposed robotic space scenarios.