Human long duration exploration missions (LDEMs) raise a number of technological challenges. This paper addresses the question of the crew autonomy: as the distances increase, the communication delays and constraints tend to prevent the astronauts from being monitored and supported by a real time ground control. Eventually, future planetary missions will necessarily require a form of astronaut self-scheduling. We study the usage of a computer decision-support tool by a crew of analog astronauts, during a Mars simulation mission conducted at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS, Mars Society) in Utah. The proposed tool, called Romie, belongs to the new category of Robust Advanced Modelling and Scheduling (RAMS) systems. It allows the crew members (i) to visually model their scientific objectives and constraints, (ii) to compute near-optimal operational schedules while taking uncertainty into account, (iii) to monitor the execution of past and current activities, and (iv) to modify scientific objectives/constraints w.r.t. unforeseen events and opportunistic science. In this study, we empirically measure how the astronauts, who are novice planners, perform at using such a tool when self-scheduling under the realistic assumptions of a simulated Martian planetary habitat.

Onboard autonomy technologies such as planning and scheduling, identification of scientific targets, and content-based data summarization, will lead to exciting new space science missions. However, the challenge of operating missions with such onboard autonomous capabilities has not been studied to a level of detail sufficient for consideration in mission concepts. These autonomy capabilities will require changes to current operations processes, practices, and tools. We have developed a case study to assess the changes needed to enable operators and scientists to operate an autonomous spacecraft by facilitating a common model between the ground personnel and the onboard algorithms. We assess the new operations tools and workflows necessary to enable operators and scientists to convey their desired intent to the spacecraft, and to be able to reconstruct and explain the decisions made onboard and the state of the spacecraft. Mock-ups of these tools were used in a user study to understand the effectiveness of the processes and tools in enabling a shared framework of understanding, and in the ability of the operators and scientists to effectively achieve mission science objectives.

We review the 2016 International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS), the fifth in a series of competitions started in 2005. ICKEPS series focuses on promoting the importance of knowledge engineering methods and tools for automated Planning and Scheduling systems.

We review the 2016 International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS), the fifth in a series of competitions started in 2005. ICKEPS series focuses on promoting the importance of knowledge engineering methods and tools for automated Planning and Scheduling systems.

Our research focuses on the use of Planning & Scheduling (P&S) technology for a team of robots providing daily assistance to multiple elder adults living in retirement facilities. Multi-user assistance and group-based activities require robots to plan and schedule their human-robot interaction (HRI) activities based on the specific needs, time constraints, availability and preferences of the multiple users. In this paper, we introduce and implement a novel centralized system architecture that can manage real P&S scenarios with multiple socially assistive robots, multiple users and their individual schedules, and single- and multi-person assistive activities. We describe how the main components of the proposed P&S architecture are integrated to control the robots, and to generate and monitor sequences of temporally annotated activities using off-the-shelf temporal planners. We verify that the architecture can manage realistic scenarios with three assistive robots, twenty users, and several single- and group-based activity requests during a single day.