A Robot Supervision Architecture for Safe and Efficient Space Exploration and Operation

Abstract

Current NASA plans envision human beings returning to the Moon in 2018 and, once there, establishing a permanent outpost from which we may initiate a long-term effort to visit other planetary bodies in the Solar System. This will be a bold, risky, and costly journey, comparable to the Great Navigations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Therefore, it is important that all possible actions be taken to maximize the astronauts' safety and productivity. This can be achieved by deploying fleets of autonomous robots for mineral prospecting and mining, habitat construction, fuel production, inspection and maintenance, etc.; and by providing the humans with the capability to telesupervise the robots' operation and to teleoperate them whenever necessary or appropriate, all from a safe, "shirtsleeve" environment. This paper describes the authors' work in progress on the development of a Robot Supervision Architecture (RSA) for safe and efficient space exploration and operation. By combining the humans' advanced reasoning capabilities with the robots' suitability for harsh space environments, we will demonstrate significant productivity gains while reducing the amount of weight that must be lifted from Earth -and, therefore, cost.Our first instantiation of the RSA is a wide-area mineral prospecting task, where a fleet of robots survey a pre-determined area autonomously, sampling for minerals of interest. When the robots require assistance -e.g., when they encounter navigation problems, reach a prospecting site, or find a potentially interesting rock formationthey signal a human telesupervisor at base, who intervenes via a high-fidelity geometrically-correct stereoscopic telepresence system (Figure 1a). In addition to prospecting, the RSA applies to a variety of other tasks, both on the surface: mining, transporting, and construction -and on-orbit: construction, inspection, and repair of large space structures and satellites (Figure 1b).

Modular mobile manipulators coalition formation through distributed transportation tasks allocation

“…Usually, they are connected and have several perception sensors used for localisation, safety and obstacle avoidance. 11 They are used in several fields such as manufacturing systems, 12,13 military operations, 14 medical care systems, space exploration, 15 etc. In the industrial field, these robots are called AGVs (Automatic Guided Vehicles).…”

“…Nevertheless, most of that works limit transport entities to AGVs. 9,15 As a result, only the transportation operation is taking into account, the operations of loading and unloading are neglected. Rey et al 28 categorized the assignment approaches into six groups which are summarized with their characteristics in Table 1.…”

Multiple-Robot Systems for USAR: Key Design Attributes and Deployment Issues

“…With the current state of interaction between humans and robots, researchers have identified a number of applications in which mobile robots using the current state of technology can contribute. Such applications include combat (Yamauchi, 2004; Barnes, Everett, & Rudakevych, 2005), space exploration (Schreckenghost, Fong, & Milam, 2008; Bellingham & Rajan, 2007; Halberstam, et al, 2006), oceanography (Bellingham & Rajan, 2007) as well as search and rescue. In the research described here, the focus will be on robot deployment for search and rescue.…”

The Telesupervised Adaptive Ocean Sensor Fleet Architecture

“…The SSA also provides an operator interface for those occasions when a scientist desires to exert direct monitoring and control of individual boats and their instruments. The SSA is based on the Robot Supervision Architecture[1,2,3,4] developed by CMU and JPL. Software components of the TAOSF architecture.…”