Thomas M. Crockett

Polyphony: A Workflow Orchestration Framework for Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing has delivered unprecedented compute capacity to NASA missions at affordable rates. Missions like the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and Mars Science Lab (MSL) are enjoying the elasticity that enables them to leverage hundreds, if not thousands, or machines for short durations without making any hardware procurements. In this paper, we describe Polyphony, a resilient, scalable, and modular framework that efficiently leverages a large set of computing resources to perform parallel computations. Polyphony can employ resources on the cloud, excess capacity on local machines, as well as spare resources on the supercomputing center, and it enables these resources to work in concert to accomplish a common goal. Polyphony is resilient to node failures, even if they occur in the middle of a transaction. We will conclude with an evaluation of a production-ready application built on top of Polyphony to perform image-processing operations of images from around the solar system, including Mars, Saturn, and Titan.

Delivering Images for Mars Rover Science Planning

Mars rover images provide essential context for planning science activities. This work describes a method for delivering Mars rover images to operations planners that is highly efficient and scalable. Experimental results of various image compression strategies applied to rover images are given. Next, an adaptive level-of-detail tile-based delivery methodology for images is presented. With a tile-aware image browsing application, images of virtually limitless size may be distributed to participating scientists with great efficiency and thus provide a common collaborative context. This work also describes advances in mosaicking rover images in support of operations planning.

Spatial planning for robotics operations

The rich variety of unmanned robotics at NASAs 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 users perspective. Furthermore, we leveraged the interfaces that our customers are already familiar with to make the capability intuitive to utilize.

Telerobotics as programming

We present MSLICE Sequencing (MSEQ), an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for robot command sequences, which will be used to construct and integrate sequences for the Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to launch in November of 2011. MSEQ is an experiment in combining the paradigms of software development and robotic operations, under the thesis that the latter can benefit greatly from reusing the technologies developed to assist in the former. 12