Relating Downlink Data Products to Uplink Commands

An improved data-labeling system provides for automatic association of data products of an exploratory robot (downlink information) with previously transmitted commands (uplink information) that caused the robot to gather the data. Such association is essential to correct and timely analysis of the data products — including, for example, association of the data with the correct targets. The system was developed for use on Mars Rover missions during the next few years. The system could also be adapted to terrestrial exploratory telerobots for which delays between commands and data returns are long enough to give rise to questions as to which commands resulted in which data returns. The main advantage of this system over prior data-labeling systems is that given a downlink data product, the uplink command and sequence hierarchy that produced it are automatically provided, and given an uplink sequence and command, the downlink data products that it produced are automatically provided.