MAPGEN (Mixed Initiative Activity Planning Generator) is a ground-based decision support system for Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER) staff that begins to give content to the notion of autonomous planetary exploration, providing mission staff with automatic planning and scheduling.

Each day during MER scientists decide science goals for a rover. Then mission engineers build a plan, or a set of software commands that tells the rover precisely how to accomplish the scientists' goals. Working with the mission operators, MAPGEN gives computers the intelligence to take care of many of the details involved with building the plan.

While making plans, scientists and engineers work together to enter constraints on particular science goals. For example, "these pictures should be taken between 30 and 60 seconds apart to make a 'cloud movie'," or "this picture should be taken at sunrise."

Mission engineers use the MAPGEN to squeeze in as many of the science goals as possible. The system makes sure the plan stays within safe boundaries for resources like battery power and enforces the science constraints like scheduling the picture at sunrise.

The planner can take into account hundreds of constraints when it lays out the schedule, says MER tactical activity planner Brian Chafin. "MAPGEN enables the mission staff to schedule potentially conflicting observations much more quickly than if a person made the plan without the software. MAPGEN is certainly critical in getting back a reasonable amount of science data from the mission."

MAPGEN enables the engineer to critique a plan that the system automatically produces, and ensures that resulting plans are viable within specified mission and flight rules, says MAPGEN project lead Kanna Rajan.

"In this way, while the routine plan generation process is handled by the machine, the human operator brings his unique knowledge and experience to bear to produce qualitatively good plans by relying on his judgment," Rajan says. Using the final MAPGEN plan, the surface operations team will use another piece of software, RSVP, to build the actual sequences for uplinking to the rover.

MAPGEN uses the planner from a software system that in 1999 demonstrated for the first time that a spacecraft could in effect fly itself. Rajan was a principal member of the team that developed the software, the Remote Agent, which enabled the Deep Space 1 spacecraft to generate a mission plan and execute it onboard with no human supervision. Remote Agent was risky but successful. It opened the notion that autonomy is useful and can be done onboard.

More about MAPGEN (PDF)