Communicating Intent for Planning and Scheduling Tasks

This paper concerns the relation between people, technology and cognitive work, in planning and scheduling remote, temporally extended telerobotic action. We combined a computational theory of planning with ethnographic methods to design a framework for expressing the intent behind requested science observations for the 2004 Mars Exploration Rover mission. The evolution and usage of this framework substantiates a distinction between the purposes and methods of work, consistent with a computational view of planning. However, we also identify several other properties of intent that acknowledge it’s role as a boundary object in coordinating collaborative planning, including the identity of the source of a request and it’s priority. In addition, scientists developed artifacts to compensate for the limitations of the intent framework, including the ability to express plans that unfold across arbitrary units of time, and objects of scientific interest that have spatial extent.