Application of artificial neural networks in autonomous mission planning for planetary rovers

The mission planning is a field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is intractable in the general case. The mission planning problems are usually complex and difficult to be solved by conventional techniques. Practically, researchers turn to solve these problems which are limited by deterministic parameters with all kinds of heuristic algorithms. As to the problems in real world, these approaches are defective sometimes because of complex constraints. In this study, artificial neural networks (ANN) are applied to the mission planning. The utilization of artificial neural networks on solving planning problems is also examined; at the same time, an ANN model is developed by using multiple layer perceptron networks and carried out to solve a real world problem in rover domain.