Summary

We are a team of five Master of Human-Computer Interaction students at Carnegie Mellon University. For our final capstone project, our clients, the HCI Group at NASA Ames Research Center, have tasked us to design an interface to facilitate rover mission planning. This project involves the ability of people on Earth to effectively control rovers on Mars. Current systems require about 40 person-hours to produce a single day of rover activity. The effectiveness of our solution was tested using a simulation, which highlights the problems and difficulties that NASA Robot Operators and Scientists actually experience.

The simulation involves two participants: one taking on the role of a scientist, the other an engineer. The scientist’s main goal is to acquire as many points possible by taking pictures of interesting science targets, while the engineer’s main goal is to visit as many targets possible while using as little resources as he can. However, both must effectively collaborate in order to achieve the high score. The board consists of an area of the floor with target blocks placed within a grid and a personal exploration rover. The interface provides an overhead map view of the board as well as a command sequence and an error correction mode.

From pre-planning through data analysis, the interface supports the collaboration between the scientist and the engineer as well as correct for error and providing rover control.