Safe Interactions and Kinesthetic Feedback in High Performance Earth-To-Moon Teleoperation

Abstract

The international space agencies plan to implement orbiting space stations around celestial bodies as moon or Mars in the near future. Autonomous robots will be assigned with exploration tasks and the building of structures as habitats. A teleoperator interface will be available in the orbiter to assure the possibility of direct control of the robots located on the celestial body as a fallback, in case an autonomous functionality fails. Communication links will be comparable to the ones between the International Space Station and earth, reaching from direct S-band communication, to communication via geostationary relay satellites in a Ku-Forward link. Since the planned Gateway orbiting the moon will not be manned throughout the year, further interfaces have to be established with which the robots can be controlled from earth. An available laser link to the moon provides a high-bandwidth communication with 2.6s roundtrip-delay, which currently allows for supervised control, for example via a tablet interface. Current advances in control theory can achieve stable and high performance kinesthetic feedback in bilateral telemanipulation at delays above 1s. This paper presents the first experimental analysis of the feasibility and human operator performance of telemanipulation with an Earth-to-Moon like delay of 3s. In light of the fact that several technologies such as visual augmentation and shared control can be integrated in addition, the results are highly promising.