Description: 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.

Benefits: The proposed xPACE software has relevance to both near-term and long-term NASA human-robot missions. Near-term, the human operator will tele-operate the robot from a remote location, as proposed for the Resource Prospector mission. For such missions, xPACE improves the remote operator's ability to quickly produce safer, more effective plans when replanning during operations. Longer term, the crew will manage robots operating more autonomously. Such management requires the human operator to plan the activities of one or more robots, direct the execution of the resulting task sequences, and adapt plans when problems or opportunities arrive. For such missions, xPACE can help crew compare plans from different perspectives to reveal plan strengths and weaknesses. The software also will support modifying plan parameters to improve plan effectiveness and reduce plan risks.

Unmanned Vehicles (UVs; air, ground, and underwater) are used increasingly in military operations. As the number of vehicles and variety of missions increases, planning for the coordination of multiple remote robots becomes more important. TRACLabs is developing the Autonomy Management Platform to integrate autonomous planning technology with PRIDE electronic procedures for coordinating groups of UVs for the Navy. The proposed xPACE software would complement this effort by providing tools to help soldiers understand the effectiveness and risks of the plans produced by automated planners. TRACLabs has a multi-year contract with an upstream oil and gas business to develop electronic procedures for drilling automation, with the goal of commercializing a suite of products for these industries. The proposed xPACE software could be integrated with PRIDE procedures to deliver a new product for building and revising procedures used to automate drilling operations. Longer term, this product line could be used with unmanned vehicles operating at offshore rigs, such as robot inspection and maintenance for the oil and natural gas drilling, extraction, and processing.