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Game theory basis for control of long-lived lunar/planetary surface robots

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Abstract

Current and future NASA robotic missions to planetary surfaces are tending toward longer duration and are becoming more ambitious for rough terrain access. For a higher level of autonomy in such missions, the rovers will require behavior that must also adapt to declining health and unknown environmental conditions. The MER (Mars Exploration Rovers) called Spirit and Opportunity have both passed 600 days of life on the Martian surface, with extensions to 1000 days and beyond depending on rover health. Changes in navigational planning due to degradation of the drive motors as they reach their lifetime are currently done on Earth for the Spirit rover. The upcoming 2009 MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) and 2013 AFL (Astrobiology Field Laboratory) missions are planned to last 300–500 days, and will possibly involve traverses on the order of multiple kilometers over challenging terrain. This paper presents a unified coherent framework called SMART (System for Mobility and Access to Rough Terrain) that uses game theoretical algorithms running onboard a planetary surface rover to safeguard rover health during rough terrain access. SMART treats rover motion, task planning, and resource management as a Two Person Zero Sum Game (TPZSG), where the rover is one player opposed by the other player called “nature” representing uncertainty in sensing and prediction of the internal and external environments. We also present preliminary results of some field studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA, 91109

    Terry L. Huntsberger & Abhijit Sengupta

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  1. Terry L. Huntsberger
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  2. Abhijit Sengupta
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Correspondence to Terry L. Huntsberger.

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Terry Huntsberger is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff in the Advanced Robotic Controls Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, where he is the Manager for numerous tasks in the areas of multi-robot control systems, and rover systems for access to high risk terrain. He is an Adjunct Professor and former Director of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include behavior-based control, computer vision, neural networks, wavelets, and biologically inspired system design. Dr. Huntsberger has published over 120 technical articles in these and associated areas. He received his PhD in Physics in 1978 from the University of South Carolina. He is a member of SPIE, ACM, IEEE Computer Society, and INNS.

Abhijit Sengupta is a Senior Member of Engineering Staff in the Advanced Concepts and Architecture Group of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. His research interest includes distributed architecture, algorithm design and fault-tolerant computing and he has more than 100 publications in these and other related areas. Prior to joining JPL in 2001, he was a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 in Electronic Engineering from the University of Calcutta.

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Huntsberger, T.L., Sengupta, A. Game theory basis for control of long-lived lunar/planetary surface robots. Auton Robot 20, 85–95 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-006-5940-7

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