Expressing Campaign Intent to Increase Productivity of Planetary Exploration Rovers

Achieving consistently high levels of productivity has been a challenge for Mars surface missions. While the rovers have made major discoveries and dramatically increased our understanding of Mars, they often require a great deal of effort from the operations teams and achieving mission objectives can take longer than anticipated. Missions have begun investigating ways to enhance productivity by increasing the amount of decision-making performed onboard the rovers. Our work focuses on the use of goal-based commanding as a means of more productively operating rovers. In particular, we are working on ways to convey the intent that operations team use to conduct science campaigns to the rover so that it can guide the rover in creating high quality plans and in identifying its own goals based on operator guidance. In addition to informing future surface exploration missions, this work is relevant for a wide range of applications in which operators must interact with limited communication opportunities.