Dr. Tara Estlin is a senior member of the Artificial Intelligence Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California where she performs research and development of planning and scheduling systems for rover automation.

Dr. Estlin manages several technology efforts that are developing capabilities for autonomous rover operations. A primary goal of these efforts is to support onboard sequencing and opportunistic science handling for future surface missions. Dr. Estlin is the lead for the AEGIS Project, which is currently providing onboard targeting capabilities for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Mission and was recently awarded the 2011 NASA Software of the Year Award. She is also a rover driver for the MER Rover Mission where she is responsible for sequencing drive and arm deployment commands for the MER Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

Dr. Estlin holds a B.S. in computer science from Tulane University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Group Links

• Planning and Scheduling Group at JPL
• Planning and Execution Systems Section at JPL

Projects

• AEGIS Project
• OASIS Project
• 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers (MER)
• CLARAty Rover Autonomy Architecture
• Coordinating multi-rover operations

Other useful links:

• Publications