Multi-Robot Planetary Exploration Command and Control

Aurora Flight Sciences, The MIT Manned Vehicle Laboratory (MVL), and the MIT Humans and Automation Laboratory (HAL) together propose to adapt existing software, algorithms, and human interfaces into a software system that performs command and control of a heterogeneous team of mobile robots, operating in a variety of modalities, to perform multi-agent planetary exploration. The system will provide ground control user interfaces and data management that (1) allows for interactive user control of the team in a time-delayed control environment, (2) maintains operator situation awareness, providing a human interface for setting up a task queue that can be autonomously executed with limited/no human interaction, (3) allows the multi-robot team to optimize task performance as geospatial, navigation and other sensor information is gathered, and (4) is supported by recent algorithm and software developments in the military multi-vehicle control regime (including human interfaces).