Visualizing and Comparing Exploration Plan Alternatives and Change Effects (xPACE)

Future human space flight missions will take astronauts deeper into space and require increased crew independence from Earth-based flight controllers (crew autonomy). Consequently, they will need to perform more tasks and a greater diversity of tasks. A critical resource for meeting these challenges is greater reliance on robots that can operate with more autonomously [NASA Roadmap TA4]. Greater robot autonomy will require astronauts to manage remote robots operating concurrently with humans. Such management requires the astronaut to plan the activities of one or more robots, direct the execution of the resulting task sequences, and adapt plans when problems or opportunities occur.TRACLabs and CMU propose to develop software for visualizing and comparing exploration plan alternatives and change effects (xPACE) to help crew adapt robot plans quickly and effectively. The xPACE web application will combine robot plans with data describing the site and the mission, and with resource estimates for plan activities to compute plan figures of merit. These figures of merit will characterize mission benefits, resource costs, and robot risks for robot plans. xPACE will provide web visualizations of these costs and benefits, with the goal of helping both planners and operators to design plan contingencies and perform trades among plan alternatives. xPACE also will enable users to compare plans as executed to the original plans to better understand difficulties encountered when executing the plan and to inform both re-planning during operations and future planning. The xPACE web application will be integrated with plan editors like the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) Exploration Ground Data System (xGDS) planning software. It will be evaluated using data from real or simulated NASA robots.