A Timeline Representation for the Jade Rabbit Rover

In China’s “Chang’e 3” mission, an action-based planning (ABP) method was used to support the “Jade Rabbit” rover to complete its scientific missions. However, ABP supports limited flexibility in plan execution, and requires a lot of re-planning efforts. Here we propose to use another well-known planning framework – the timeline-based planning (TLBP), to model and solve the mission. TLBP planners can generate plans with temporal constraints, which supports a flexible execution of the plans. Our first contribution is to demonstrate how object-oriented modelling can be used to represent the control problem of the “Jade Rabbit” in a language called NDDL. Second, we use the resulted problems to show that these problems challenge a state-of-the-art TLBP planner EUROPA. Also, the problems we encoded are of varying size, and provides a new benchmark for the TLBP community.