Schedule

10th International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space

Thursday 15th June 2017: Gates-Hillman Center (GHC) 4405

Friday 16th June 2017: Gates-Hillman Center (GHC) 6115

Invited Talk: 0900 Thursday 15th June 2017

Toward the Design and Operation of Self-Reliant Rovers

Dr. Daniel Gaines

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

California Institute of Technology

Achieving consistently high levels of productivity has been a challenge for Mars surface missions. While the rovers have made major discoveries and dramatically increased our understanding of Mars, they often require a great deal of effort from the operations teams and achieving objectives can take longer than anticipated. We are conducting a project to design Self-Reliant Rovers; rovers that are able to maintain high levels of productivity with reduced reliance on ground interactions while making it easier for operators to provide objectives and guidance to the vehicle. Our project is identifying the changes to flight software and ground operations to enable this approach to surface missions.

We began the project with an in-depth case study of Mars Science Laboratory operations in order to identify the productivity challenges facing surface missions. I will summarize the results of this study and describe how the Self-Reliant Rover design is addressing these challenges.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Daniel Gaines is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Artificial Intelligence Group of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.

He is currently Deputy Cognizant Engineer for the M2020 Rover Mission Flight Software, with a focus on Surface software. He is also Principal Investigator for the Self-Reliant Rover task at JPL, a research effort to advance rover autonomy.

He is a Mission Lead on the operations team for the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover mission. Previously he was the Lead Developer for several MSL flight software modules including sequencing and wake/sleep.

In 2013 Dr. Gaines was awarded the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for technical contributions to the resolution of the MSL Rad750 anomaly. Dr. Gaines was also a key contributor to the AEGIS autonomy software onboard both the MSL and MER rovers. AEGIS won the NASA Software of the Year Competition in 2011.