NASA research and development for space telerobotics

The goal of this research is to explore and prevent robust concepts for telerobotic support of space servicing, assembly, maintenance, and telescience tasks. This goal is being addressed through a program of coordinated work in artificial intelligence, robotics, and human factors. The general research objective is the fusion of robot sensing and manipulation, teleoperation, and human and machine cognitive skills into an effective architecture for supervised task automation. NASA is evaluating results of this research program in a ground laboratory telerobot testbed under development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The testbed development activity includes integrated technology demonstrations. The demonstrations show telerobot capabilities to perform tasks of increasing complexity, and duration in increasingly unstructured environments. The first such demonstration is the ground-based grappling, docking, and servicing of a satellite taskboard. The author outlines this demonstration and briefly reports on some aspects of its implementation