Teleoperated Mapping Workflows With Light-Speed Delay

Earth-to-Mars one-way delay runs 3-22 minutes, so teleoperated acoustic survey workflows must front-load intent and let the robot finish each patch without Earth in the loop. EchoQuilt formalizes delay-aware supervisory control against BASALT field protocols.

A Hawaiian BASALT-style simulation team tried to remote-drive a rover through a Kilauea lava tube using a 14-minute one-way simulated Mars delay. The operator, sitting at a JPL-style console, issued a "move forward 4 meters, record 30 seconds, tell me what you heard" command at 09:00 LMST. The rover's reply would not reach Earth until 09:28 LMST. By then, the operator had context-switched to other sols. The patch arrived orphaned, with no live link to the reasoning that commanded it, and the geometry team spent two days trying to reconstruct what the operator had been looking for.