Includes a specific symposium on Distributed Plan and Schedule Management:
http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/2006/sssparticipation-06.html#ss04

4th International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space
June 23 - 25 , 2004 - Darmstadt - GERMANY
http://www.congrex.nl/04c06/
---
3rd International NASA Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space
October 27-29, 2002 - Houston Texas USA
http://www.planning.systems.org
---
2nd International NASA Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space
March 16th to 18th 2000 - San Francisco, California, USA
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/ic/psworkshop/
---
Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space
October 1997, Oxnard, California, USA
http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/NASA-ps97/

• http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/sci/fifthconf99/6160.pdf
• http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/meca.php
• http://www.unr.edu/spacegrant/epscor/Documents/Jones.pdf

The AMHA (Automatic Mental Health Assistant) project is part of the Mars-500 experiment to be carried out at the Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow. This project explores the use of strategic multi-player games to alleviate stress, and more importantly as an unintrusive tool to monitor the mental capacity of astronauts as well as the development of different social interaction patterns within the crew.

Project's homepage: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fire

Associated lab/group: Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab

Project Description

The FIRE Project, part of the NASA Intelligent Systems Program, aims at investigating and understanding fundamental issues in heterogeneous multi-robot coordination. We focus on domains, such as space exploration, where complex tasks must be performed in environments that are largely inaccessible to humans. The name, FIRE (Federation of Intelligent Robotic Explorers), provides an apt overview of the major themes of this project.

The notion of a federation allows for tremendous lattitude in the exact structure of an organization. A federation can be composed of sub-organizations, or entities, that are heterogeneous, being vastly different in size, structure, capabilities, etc. Each of the sub-organizations or entities retains some degree of autonomy, but also agrees to abide by the general rules that govern the functioning of the federation.

In the FIRE Project, we focus on federations of autonomous mobile robots. We believe that teams of heterogeneous (specialized) robots have advantages over general-purpose robots in being able to accomplish many complex tasks faster, more reliably, and more cheaply. Heterogeneous teams enable the utilization of time- and resource-saving strategies that exploit specialization, providing the potential for high quality results while also maintaining fault tolerence.

Robots in our federation are intelligent, capable of operating with a high degree of autonomy and developing both individual and group-level strategies for accomplishing tasks. The group-level strategies are able to accomodate a wide range cooperation from tightly The nature of the federation is also quite fluid, with teams dynamically forming to perform tasks and desolving when tasks are finished.

The domain of focus in the FIRE Project is space (more specifically Mars) exploration, where human access is extremely difficult and communication limitations with Earth necessitate highly autonomous robots. We envision a scenario where a heterogeneous colony of robots is deployed on Mars. Scientists on Earth communicate high-level task descriptions to the colony (e.g., "find and gather data on several carbonate rocks"). The robots are reponsible for deciding how tasks are to be accomplished, based, among other things, on the tasks' relative priorities. The goal for the robots is to utilize their time, resources, and capabilities efficiently so as to provide the highest possible scientific return on the tasks they are given.

ESTEC/Contract No. 14056/99/NL/PA

On the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts execute thousands of complex procedures to maintain life support systems, check out space suits, conduct science experiments and perform medical exams, among their many tasks. Today, when carrying out these procedures, an astronaut usually reads from a PDF viewer on a laptop computer, which requires them to shift attention from the task to scroll pages.

Clarissa is a fully voice-operated procedure browser, enabling astronauts to be more efficient with their hands and eyes and to give full attention to the task while they navigate through the procedure using spoken commands. The software was installed on the ISS in January 2005, and was first used by Expedition 11 Science Officer and Flight Engineer John Phillips on June 27, 2005. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever use of a spoken dialogue system in space. During the test, Phillips completed the interactive Clarissa training procedure, which exercises all the main system functionality; this procedure contains 50 steps, and took 25 minutes to complete. Speech recognition and dialogue management functioned well. A report summarizing the results is available here.

• AAS BOOKS ON MARS EXPLORATION:
  http://www.univelt.com/marspubs.html
• NON-AAS BOOKS IN MARS EXPLORATION:
  http://www.univelt.com/marssoc/NonAAS.html