Ground-Based Automated Scheduling for the Mars 2020 Rover

The Mars 2020 Rover Mission will be using an automated ground-based scheduling system called Copilot to schedule the rover’s activities at landing. Using automated scheduling technology will allow for plans to be generated more quickly. Because automated scheduling tools have not been widely used for prior rover missions, developing users’ trust in the system is crucial. An explainable scheduling tool called Crosscheck has been developed to visualize the creation of a schedule, and to explain why activities failed to schedule given their constraints. This will allow science planners to change activity constraints to allow failed activities to successfully schedule, achieving their science goals.