Advanced Ground-Based Telerobotic Operations and Simulation Environment.

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the modeling and simulation capabilities of the Servicing Test Facility (STF) developed by DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen. The facility has the main purpose to provide a simulation environment for real-time dynamic simulations, hardware component testing and human teleoperator training. This will give confidence in novel telecontrol tech- nologies and provides the capability to investigate the support needs of the teleoperator in order to perform his task. This paper outlines the general setup of the facility with user inter- face, computational resources, software architecture and hardware equipment of the laboratory. The main focus lies on the overall software architecture and the capabilities of the simulation facilityfacility. Emphasis is given to the presentation of the efficient data flow management between the different processes running on a total of 4 computer systems. In this context, within the simulation environment, the integration of the software tools used is shown. This includes the task of running complex real-time telerobotic operations and simulations commanded interactively by an operator.