Adapting Planetary Rover Plans via Action Modality Reconfiguration

Robust execution of exploration mission plans has to deal with limited computational power on-board a planetary rover, and with limited rover’s autonomy. Typically, these limitations prevent the rover to synthesize a new mission plan when contingencies arise. The paper shows that when contingencies are deviations on the consumption of resources, robust execution can be achieved efficiently through action reconfiguration rather than replanning from scratch. The paper therefore introduces a novel representation of actions with modalities, and proposes an action reconfiguration module - ReCon - that detects the violation of mission resource constraints, and finds (if any) a new configuration of action modalities to resolve these violations.