A task planner for the computer-aided design of a space-lander robot

The Rosetta project has to design, and launch a robotic comet lander in 2003 in order to carry out extensive scientific analyse´s of the P/Wirtanen comet following a rendezvous in 2011. A mission simulator was developed in order to obtain information on the critical resources of the lander. However, one needs to feed a simulator with realistic task sequences, that is, plans meeting all the constraints and goals of the mission. Such entries are very difficult to obtain through hand coding or even impossible without computations. We propose a general temporal planner, called I_XT_ET, to provide these mission plans as part of the design process. After a brief introduction on the Rosetta project, we present our approach and discuss the advantages and difficulties encountered in using a general temporal planner for the dimensioning and optimisation of the space-robot resources. Results achieved so far are illustrated