Knowledge Driven Orbit-to-Ground Teleoperation of a Robot Coworker

The crewed exploration of Moon and Mars requires the construction and maintenance of infrastructure on the alien surfaces before a crew arrives. Robotic coworkers are envisioned to take over the physical labor required to set-up crew habitats, energy supplies, and return vehicles in the hazardous environment. Deploying these robots in such a remote location poses a challenge that requires autonomous robot capabilities in combination with effective Human Robot Interfaces (HRIs), which comply with the harsh conditions of deep space operations. An astronaut-robot teleoperation concept targeting these topics has been evaluated in DLR and ESA's METERON SUPVIS Justin experiment where astronauts on-board the International Space Station (ISS) commanded DLR's humanoid robot Rollin' Justin in a simulated Martian environment on Earth. This work extends on our previously presented preliminary insights on the practicability and intuitiveness of our approach to supervised autonomy. It examines the results of the two follow-up experiment sessions which investigated maintenance and assembly tasks in real-world scenarios. We discuss the use of our system in real space-to-ground deployment and analyze key performance metrics of the HRI and the feedback given by the astronauts