Overview | Supporting Mars Exploration | EUROPA Planning Architecture

With its advanced, flexible constraint-based planning capabilities, MAPGEN provides mission controllers with the ability to rapidly generate activity plans for robots and spacecraft, enabling more activities per command cycle and increased scientific return on investment.

Automated Activity Plan Generation

MAPGEN was an important technology used by mission controllers during NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.

MAPGEN was an important technology used by mission controllers during NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.

MAPGEN is a mixed-initiative activity plan generation tool that is used to develop detailed, highly efficient command sequences for controlling spacecraft. By having more efficient plans, spacecraft are able to maximize the amount of scientific data they can collect, improving scientific return on investment and reducing operational costs.

As a mixed-initiative planning tool, MAPGEN puts the user in control of guiding, monitoring, and overriding if necessary, the automated decision making that is being performed. This allows users to interactively create activity plans based on ever changing mission requirements.

The activity plans produced by MAPGEN describe a valid and safe plan for the spacecraft. These plans include a variety of spacecraft maintenance activities as well as the activities required to collect scientific data.

MAPGEN's timeline-based user interface allows human-in-the-loop monitoring and control of the activity plans created by the software.

MAPGEN's timeline-based user interface allows human-in-the-loop monitoring and control of the activity plans created by the software.

Through the utilization of constraint-based planning, MAPGEN is able to explore a broad range of options when creating activity plans. In constraint-based planning, activity plans are built using a series of intervals, which represent the operational parameters of an individual activity. These intervals are linked together to create a constraint network that is then validated to ensure that none of the constraints are violated. As the plans are developed, MAPGEN actively enforces flight rules, relieving human operators from having to check for flight rule violations once the activity plan is complete.

One important aspect of MAPGEN is that it enables human-in-the-loop oversight of plan development. This allows human controllers to interact with MAPGEN as it creates activity plans. When humans decide to update or modify an activity plan, MAPGEN automatically performs conflict resolution and flight rule enforcement, freeing human controllers to focus on decisions that require human insight and not worry about the minute details of generating a valid plan.

What's Next?

NASA's Vision for Space Exploration will require the utilization of advanced automated planning technologies such as MAPGEN to dramatically reduce the operational costs of spacecraft and robots.

To this end, MAPGEN is being refined to make the tool easier to use and more capable. In the future, MAPGEN will be used by not only scientists, but also engineers, mission staff, and spacecraft crews to handle all aspects of operations planning. This will be invaluable for humans on the Moon or Mars as they command the activities of a wide-range of robotic assistants.

Mapgen Development Team

MAPGEN was developed by a team of researchers and scientists from RIACS, NASA's Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Ari Jonsson, RIACS Principle Investigator

Supporting Mars Exploration

MAPGEN was an integral part of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, allowing mission controllers to create daily activity plans for both Spirit and Opportunity.
Read more about how MAPGEN contributed to the success of the mission.