Continuous Planning and Execution for an Autonomous Rover

This paper describes how continuous planning and execution techniques can be used to perform intelligent decision-making for an autonomous Mars rover. The resulting system coordinates low-level rover functionality to achieve science objectives while respecting rover resource and operation constraints. It provides capabilities for schedule generation, execution, monitoring, and dynamic modification to recover from unexpected events or failures. To motivate our system framework, we discuss some of the particular challenges we examine to support an autonomous rover. These challenges include properly interacting with rover navigation software, handling uncertainty in state and resource estimations, as well as effectively balancing methods for deliberative and reactive reasoning. We also describe our experiences in testing this work on two JPL rovers, in an effort to demonstrate capabilities that will support future rover missions to Mars and other planets.

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