Immersive environments are just beginning to be used to support mission operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This technology contributed to the Mars Pathfinder Mission in planning sorties for the Sojourner rover. Utilizing stereo imagery from the Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) camera enabled the operator to visualize the terrain from the lander's point of view in 3D to assist in plott...

Many challenges remain in the development of tactical planning systems that will enable automated, cooperative replanning of routes and mission assignments for multiple unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) under changing environmental and tactical conditions. We have developed such a planning system that uses an evolutionary algorithm to assign waypoints and mission goals to multiple UGVs so that th...

This paper presents a paradigm for the organizational design of complex robotics missions. A mission with important strategic goals and involving a large number of technological resources and different decision levels, such as complex robotics based missions, can be modelled as an organization. To avoid compromising the strategic goals, organizations modelling principles must account for the ma...

Immersive environments are successfully being used to support mission operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This technology contributed to the Mars Pathfinder Mission in planning sorties for the Sojourner rover. Results and operational experiences with these tools are being incorporated into the development of the second generation of mission planning tools. NASA's current plan includes ...

Clusters are important features of regional development (Porter, 2000). Within clusters there can exist intermediary organizations such as cluster initiatives (CIs), which are the focus in this paper. These mission and activities of cluster initiatives characterize them as “middlehands” organizations which perform intermediary roles as brokers, facilitators, promoters, and providers of meeting ...

One enabler for unmanned, autonomous system operation is mission awareness. Three components comprise mission awareness: knowledge of mission objectives, internal selfsituational awareness, and external self-situational awareness. Mission objectives include both high level mission goals and any details operational requirements. Internal self-situational awareness entails knowledge of platform h...