Opportunistic Rover Science: Finding and Reacting to Rocks, Clouds and Dust Devils

The goal of the Onboard Autonomous Science Investigation System (OASIS) project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is to evaluate, and autonomously act upon, science data gathered by in-situ spacecraft, such as planetary landers and rovers. Using the FIDO rover in the Mars yard at JPL, we have successfully demonstrated a closed loop system test of the rover acquiring image data, finding rocks in the image, analyzing rock properties and identifying rocks that merit further investigation. When the system on the rover alerts the rover to take additional measurements of interesting rocks, the planning and scheduling component determines if there are enough resources to meet this additional science data request. The rover is then instructed to either turn toward the rock, or to actually move closer to the rock to take an additional, close up, picture. In addition to these hardware integration successes, the OASIS team has also continued its autonomous science research by collaboratively working with other scientists and technologists to identify and react to other scientific phenomena - such as clouds and dust devils. Prototype dust devil and cloud detection algorithms were delivered to an infusion task which has refined the algorithms specifically for Mars exploration rovers (MER) and is integrating the code into the next release of MER flight software.