Applying AI action scheduling to ESA's space robotics

This paper presents recent results on applying robust state-of-the-art AI Planning and Scheduling (P&S) techniques to mobile space robotic domains. The major contribution of this paper is an enhanced version of the ESTA scheduling algorithm which is to capture all relevant aspects of the robot activity scheduling problem in the space domain of interest. Furthermore, we provide an example of how the new solver can be used within a simple model-based autonomous control system for robust action scheduling and flexible reactive schedule execution for: (1) providing initial schedule solutions and (2) repairing invalidated schedules during execution because of unexpected external events.