Spatial planning for robotics operations

The rich variety of unmanned robotics at NASA´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sets the bar for innovations in activity planning. The Operations Planning Team at JPL, co-winner of the NASA Software of the Year award in 2004, is continuously working to enhance the capabilities and user experience for long term and real-time planning operations. Spatial Querying improves the efficiency of planetary surface operations. It can empower scientists by giving them the ability to search for all imagery containing a particular point of interest. Furthermore, these queries can help maximizing the amount of science by reducing the amount of redundant imagery: before planning to acquire new images of a location, planners can check if they already have sufficient data for it. In this paper, we describe our use of R-Trees, along with novel 3D to 2D projections, to delivery spatial querying capabilities to the operators and scientists of MER and MSL mission. Aside from covering the implementation details, we discuss a key aspect of our software: the user interface. To make the interface effective, we stressed low latency and fast computations on the server side to emphasize instant gratification from the user´s perspective. Furthermore, we leveraged the interfaces that our customers are already familiar with to make the capability intuitive to utilize.