December 5, Tuesday
12:00 – 14:00
Decision-Theoretic Planning for Planetary Exploration
Computer Science seminar
Lecturer : Prof. Ronen Brafman
Affiliation : Cs Department, Ben Gurion University
Location : -101/58
Host : Dr. Michael Elkin
During the last two years, I took part in a project at NASA Ames Research Center that attempts to improve the technology used to do activity planning for the Mars Exploration Rovers, and rovers for future NASA missions. The Mars rovers are autonomous vehicles that roam around the surface of Mars looking for interseting data. They can take pictures and perform various experiments. They have to operate autonomously for long strecthes at a time. These rovers are considered a great success story, but they are actually idle a great portion of the time. In this talk I'll explain the problems with current technology used to select their plans, and the work we did on devising planning algorithms that can come up with much better plans. This is joint work with a large group at NASA headed by Nicolaus Meuleau.