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, including both rover and aerobot missions. Dr. Estlin is the Automated Planning Lead for the OASIS Project, which is developing technology for onboard rover science. She is also Deputy Task Manager for the CLARAty Architecture task, which is a large robotic architecture effort at JPL that supports testing and validation of a wide range of robotic technology for future rover missions, such as the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission.

Dr. Estlin is presently a rover driver for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) 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

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

Other useful links:

• Publications