Bio: Dr. Estlin is a senior member of the Artificial Intelligence Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She has over 10 years of experience in developing spacecraft autonomy software. A primary goal of these efforts is to support onboard sequencing and opportunistic science handling for future rover missions. She is currently leading the AEGIS Project, which is providing new automated targeting technology for the MER rovers. Dr. Estlin is also presently a rover driver for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission where she is responsible for sequencing drive and arm deployment commands for the MER Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

She holds a B.S. in computer science from Tulane University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Abstract: The Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) system enables automated data collection by planetary rovers. AEGIS software was uploaded to the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission’s Opportunity rover in December 2009 and has successfully demonstrated automated onboard targeting based on scientist-specified objectives. Prior to AEGIS, geological targets for rover remote-sensing instruments, were selected through manual analysis of imagery that was transmitted back to the operations team on Earth. AEGIS represents a significant paradigm shift — by using onboard data analysis techniques, the AEGIS software selects high-quality science targets with no human in the loop. This approach allows the rover to autonomously select and sequence targeted observations in an opportunistic fashion, which is particularly promising for narrow field-of-view instruments (such as the MER Mini-TES spectrometer and the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Mission ChemCam Spectrometer). This talk will provide an overview of the AEGIS automated targeting capability and describe how it is currently being used onboard the MER mission Opportunity rover.