On January 24, 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover named Opportunity successfully landed in the region of Mars known as Meridiani Planum, a vast plain dotted with craters where orbiting spacecraft had detected the signatures of minerals believed to have formed in liquid water. The first pictures back from Opportunity revealed that the rover had landed in a crater roughly 20 meters in diameter - the only sizeable crater within hundreds of meters - which became known as Eagle Crater. And in the walls of this crater just meters away was the bedrock MER scientists had been hoping to find, which would ultimately prove that this region of Mars did indeed have a watery past. Opportunity explored Eagle Crater for almost two months, then drove more than 700 meters in one month to its next destination, the much larger Endurance Crater. After surveying the outside of Endurance Crater, Opportunity drove into the crater and meticulously studied it for six months. Then it went to examine the heat shield that had protected Opportunity during its descent through the Martian atmosphere. More than a year since landing, Opportunity is still going strong and is currently en route to Victoria Crater - more than six kilometers from Endurance Crater. Opportunity has driven more than four kilometers, examined more than eighty patches of rock and soil with instruments on the robotic arm, excavated four trenches for subsurface sampling, and sent back well over thirty thousand images of Mars - ranging from grand panoramas to up close microscopic views. This paper details the experience of driving Opportunity through this alien landscape from the point of view of the Rover Planners, the people who tell the rover where to drive and how to use its robotic arm.

The Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program is a suite of tools for the commanding of planetary rovers which are subject to significant light time delay and thus are unsuitable for tele-operation. The two main components of the program are the Rover Sequence Editor and HyperDrive. This paper will focus on HyperDrive, the immersive visualization component of the system. HyperDrive fuses multiple data types returned from the vehicle in order to facilitate an operator understanding of the current environment and past rover performance, so that safe effective command sequences for successful future rover activities may be generated on a tight tactical timeline. Multiple display and task specific interaction modalities are provided to most efficiently present relevant spatial and time series data to the sequence builder.

Spirit is one of two rovers that landed on Mars in January 2004 as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. As of July 2005, Spirit has traveled over 4.5 kilometers across the Martian surface while investigating rocks and soils, digging trenches to examine subsurface materials, and climbing hills to reach outcrops of bedrock. Originally designed to last 90 sols (Martian days), Spirit has survived over 500 sols of operation and continues to explore. During the mission, we achieved increases in efficiency, accuracy, and traverse capability through increasingly complex command sequences, growing experience, and updates to the on-board and ground-based software. Safe and precise mobility on slopes and in the presence of obstacles has been a primary factor in development of new software and techniques.

A Mars rover is a complex system, and driving one is a complex endeavor. Rover drivers must be intimately familiar with the hardware and software of the mobility system and of the robotic arm. They must rapidly assess threats in the terrain, then creatively combine their knowledge of the vehicle and its environment to achieve each day's science and engineering objectives. To help the Mars Exploration Rover project's rover drivers meet their goals, the software we developed to drive the rovers -- the Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program, or RSVP -- combines two representations of command sequences, one textual and one using three-dimensional graphics. Changes to one representation are instantly reflected in the other, and the combination's advantages exceed the mere sum of the parts: the different representations offer different levels of abstraction, engage different areas of the driver's brain, and complement each other's strengths. This combination plays a crucial role in simplifying a complex feat of interplanetary exploration.

Immersive environments are being used to support mission operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This technology contributed to the Mars Pathfinder Mission in planning sorties for the Sojourner rover and is being used for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. The stereo imagery captured by the rovers is used to create 3D terrain models, which can be viewed from any angle, to provide a powerful and information rich immersive visualization experience. These technologies contributed heavily to both the mission success and the phenomenal level of public outreach achieved by Mars Pathfinder and MER. This paper will review the utilization of terrain modelling for immersive environments in support of MER.

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission has returned tremendous scientific information on a daily basis, owing to the efficient sequencing capability of the ground system tools. For planning the mobility and instrument deployment device (IDD) sequences, physical-based simulation is applied to achieve fast and effective sequencing of complex rover and IDD maneuvers. The sequence rehearsal tool of the Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program (RSVP) is based on modeling and simulation of the multi-body mechanical systems. Using configuration kinematics (CK) and 3D terrain models, a methodology was developed to support a real-time, interactive graphics mode for the visualization tool. The sequence simulation is carried out using the on-board flight software modules for realistic rover behavior. This enables the scientists and rover planners to effectively develop the command sequences to maximize the science return of the MER mission while maintaining rover safety. This paper describes the innovative numerical algorithms and the command sequence simulation used by the MER mission for planning surface operations.

This paper discusses a proof-of-concept prototype for ground-based automatic generation of validated rover command sequences. This prototype is based on ASPEN (Automated Scheduling and Planning Environment). This Artificial Intelligence (AI) based planning and scheduling system will automatically generate a command sequence that will execute: within resource constraints and satisfy flight rules. An automated planning and scheduling system encodes rover design knowledge and uses the search and reasoning techniques to automatically generate low-level command sequences while respecting the rover operability constraints. This prototype planning system has been field-tested using the Rocky-7 rover at JPL, and will be field-tested on more complex rovers to prove its effectiveness before transferring the technology to flight operations for an upcoming NASA mission. The goal-driven commanding of planetary rovers greatly reduces the requirements for highly skilled rover engineering personnel. This in turn greatly reduces mission operations costs and permits a faster response to changes in rover states.

Immersive environments are successfully being used to support mission operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This technology contributed to the Mars Pathfinder Mission in planning sorties for the Sojourner rover. Results and operational experiences with these tools are being incorporated into the development of the second generation of mission planning tools. NASA's current plan includes two rovers being deployed to Mars in 2003 and early 2004. The next generation Rover Control Workstation utilizes existing technologies and more to provide a multimodal, collaborative, partially immersive environment. This system includes tools for planning long range sorties for highly autonomous rovers, tools for building the three-dimensional (3D) models of the terrain being explored, and advanced tools for visualizing telemetry from remote spacecraft and landers. These tools comprise a system for immersing the operator in the environment of another planet, body, or space to make the mission planning function more intuitive and effective.

A program to develop planetary rover technology is underway at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) under sponsorship of NASA. Developmental systems with the necessary sensing, computing, power, and mobility resources to demonstrate realistic forms of control for various missions have been developed, and initial testing has been completed. These testbed systems and the associated navigation techniques used are described. Particular emphasis is placed on three technologies: Computer-Aided Remote Driving (CARD), Semiautonomous Navigation (SAN), and behavior control. It is concluded that, through the development and evaluation of such technologies, research at JPL has expanded the set of viable planetary rover mission possibilities beyond the limits of remotely teleoperated systems such as Lunakhod. These are potentially applicable to exploration of all the solid planetary surfaces in the solar system, including Mars, Venus, and the moons of the gas giant planets.>