A high level teleoperation platform for space robotic missions

This paper describes the ongoing development of a tele-operation platform for space robotic missions. The proposed platform consists of a ground control station, an offline simulation environment, a full-scale working model of the robot and the actual robot on the mission. From the simulation environment a path strategy is obtained and a set of commands is generated and sent to the ground control station using standardized files (XML) to describe how commands and data move between functional units, this way it is no longer needed to create custom software, and/or distributed objects to communicate with new systems. Instead, only providing an XML description of how the communication takes place will be required. Then the systems can parse and interpret the XML to generate the required commands to control the unit, interface with it, construct messages and display the data that is returned. A software prototype is developed for an asteroid exploration mission to evaluate the proposed platform