Helicopter and Rover Operations on Mars using the Robot Sequencing and Visualization Program (RSVP)

The NASA Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover demonstrated the first coordinated operation between a ground based rover and aerial helicopter on another planet in April 2021. This included successful deployment of the helicopter from the belly of the rover and multiple flights of the helicopter while the rover documented the event with imaging, video, and audio. The rover relayed commands and wake up schedules to the helicopter, which it received during its daily communications with the Deep Space Network. Thus, operators on Earth needed to include commanding for both the rover and the helicopter in the daily uplink bundles. Sequencing and visualization of spacecraft commands is an integral part of verifying a set of activities prior to uplink, through simulation of hardware motion and interaction with terrain meshes. The introduction of the Ingenuity helicopter presented a need for planning multi-spacecraft interactions between the rover and helicopter. This was especially important during the critical event of driving away post helicopter deployment, involving close clearances between the systems. Helicopter flights needed to ensure a keepout distance from the rover, subsequent rover traverses needed to avoid coming into contact with the helicopter, and imaging needed to be correctly pointed to include the helicopter location and flight path. All of these capabilities were incorporated into the operations planning software used by the Helicopter Integration Engineer team to model and verify plans involving both rover and helicopter commanding. In this paper we discuss updates to the Robot Sequencing and Visualization Program (RSVP), used for coordinating the interactions between the Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover. RSVP is a visual simulation tool that fuses CAD models of the rover and helicopter, polygonal terrain meshes derived from stereo imagery, orbital and local digital elevation models (DEM), and a high fidelity kinematic simulation of vehicle/terrain interaction that is driven by a version of the Perseverance flight software. It allows for detailed simulation and inspection of all robotic commanding by operators prior to uplink to the rover on Mars. We discuss the features that were implemented specific to coordinated rover and helicopter commanding, the testing and validation on Earth in operations readiness tests, as well as the ultimate usage for Ingenuity helicopter deployment, imaging, and flights on Mars.