See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/277268674 SIMULATING AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENVIRONMENT FOR ROBOTIC SPACE EXPLORATION: THE METERON SUPVIS-JUSTIN TELEROBOTIC EXPERIMENT AND THE SOLEX PROVING GROUND CONFERENCE PAPER · MAY 2015 READS 16 8 AUTHORS, INCLUDING: Neal Y. Lii Daniel Leidner German Aerospace Center (DLR) German Aerospace Center (DLR) 20 PUBLICATIONS 43 CITATIONS 10 PUBLICATIONS 28 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Benedikt Pleintinger German Aerospace Center (DLR) 9 PUBLICATIONS 11 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Available from: Neal Y. Lii Retrieved on: 24 September 2015 SIMULATING AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENVIRONMENT FOR ROBOTIC SPACE EXPLORATION: THE METERON SUPVIS-JUSTIN TELEROBOTIC EXPERIMENT AND THE SOLEX PROVING GROUND Neal Y. Lii1, Daniel Leidner1, Andre´ Schiele2, Peter Birkenkampf1, Ralph Bayer1, Benedikt Pleintinger1, Andreas Meissner1, and Andreas Balzer1 1Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), 82234 Wessling, Germany, Email: [email protected], [email protected] 2Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory, ESA, 2201 AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands, Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper presents the on-going development for the Supvis-Justin experiment lead by DLR, together with ESA, planned for 2016. It is part of the ESA initiated Me- teron telerobotics experiment suite aimed to study differ- ent forms of telerobotics solutions for space applications. Supvis-Justin studies the user interface design, and super- vised autonomy aspects of telerobotics, as well as tele- operated tasks for a humanoid robot by teleoperating a dexterous robot on earth (located at DLR) from the Inter- national Space Station (ISS) with the use of a tablet PC. Figure 1. Space Telerobotics with the Meteron ex- In addition to giving an overview of the Supvis-Justin ex- periment suite. Target robots and rovers such as the periment, this paper focuses on the development of a sim- NASA/GM Robonaut, DLR Rollin’ Justin, and ESA Eu- ulated extraterrestrial planetary environment to be con- robot on earth can be commanded from different HMI de- structed at DLR. The SOLar Farm EXperimental Space vices including haptic input devices (e.g. force reflection Robotics Validation (Solex) environment aims to help joystick and exoskeleton), as well as notebook or tablet collect relevant data to improve future space robotic mis- PCs. Communication links between the earth and the ISS sion designs. The Solex environment, which simulates a of different latencies, jitter, and bandwidth will be uti- solar farm built on an extraterrestrial site, is intended to lized. be equipped with modular components for the testing of visual, electrical, and mechanical robot-environment in- teraction. Furthermore, local intelligence built into the Solex environment, together with modular components European Space Agency (ESA) with partners German enables flexible reconfiguration. This provides the possi- Aerospace Center (DLR), National Aeronautics and bility for a holistic investigative catalog of space robotic Space Administration (NASA) of the USA, and the Rus- tasks in an extraterrestrial environment. Current progress sian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) [1]. Its main of the development and testing for Supvis-Justin and goal is to explore different space telerobotics concepts, Solex, as well as the steps going forward, are also pre- using a variety of communication links with different la- sented. tencies and bandwidth specifications. Key words: Supervised Autonomy; Space Telerobotics; Teleoperating the robot for extraterrestrial exploration al- Humanoid Robots; Testing and Validation Environment; lows the operator to remain at a safe distance from the hu- Intuitive GUI Design; Tablet PC Based Human-Robot In- manly unreachable, and dangerous environment. For the terface. Meteron experiments, rovers and service robots would be deployed on earth, in different simulated space and planetary scenarios to perform a catalog of tasks. The target robot would be commanded from the International 1. INTRODUCTION: EXPLORING SPACE WITH Space Station (ISS), through the use of different human- TELEROBOTICS robot interface (HRI) options, ranging from laptop and tablet PCs, to force reflection joystick, and exoskeleton. Multi-purpose End-To-End Robotic Operations Network Fig. 1 gives a concept overview of the Meteron experi- (Meteron) is a suite of experiments initiated by the ment suite. Two forms of telerobotic commands would be studied in the Meteron experiment suite. One is full haptic feedback telepresence, which requires low latency communication links coupled with haptic capable robots and HMI. Sec- ond is supervised autonomy, which uses high-level ab- stract commands to communicate complex tasks to the robot. This style of telerobotics depends on the local intelligence of the robot to carry out decision making and processing on site. Supervised autonomy can signifi- cantly reduce the workload, and improve task success rate of the human-robot team [2], and tolerate significantly Figure 2. Meteron Supvis-Justin Concept. An astronaut, higher communication latencies, where multi-second de- on the ISS in orbit, teleoperates the dexterous humanoid lays can be coped with [3]. robot DLR Rollin’ Justin on the planetary surface, using a tablet PC with abstract task level commands. The com- DLR joins the Meteron project with over two decades of munication link is expected to be higher bandwidth (up to experience in space telerobotics missions, starting with multi-Mbit/s), but with high latency of up to multi-second the Rotex experiment to explore the possibilities of tele- round trip). operated robotic grasping of objects in micro-gravity [4]. With multi-second delays in the communication between the human operator on the ground, and robot on the space of the SOLar Farm EXperimental Space Robotics Val- shuttle, it required sufficient local intelligence for the idation (Solex) environment, which is being specifically robot to carry out this highly dexterous task. In this re- designed to help elucidate different robots’ capability to spect, Rotex has served well as a starting point for super- affect different objects and devices in the extraterrestrial vised autonomy experiment we intend to carry out in Me- setting. In order to systematically understand how well a teron. The ROKVISS experiment that followed, in turn, robot can perform different tasks, a well-designed prov- explored telepresence control of a robotic arm mounted ing ground is required. Solex’s main purpose is to serve on the outside of the Russian Zvezda module of the ISS. this function. [5] A real-time communication link between the ground station at DLR allowed to full haptic feedback control of The remaining of the paper is organized as follows: the robotic arm in space through a force reflection joy- Sec. 2 provides an overview of experiment architecture stick on earth. Extending on the success of ROKVISS, and design of Supvis-Justin. Sec. 3 discusses the design the force reflection joystick has been redesigned for de- concept of the Solex environment, as well as the robotic ployment on the ISS in the Kontur-2 project by DLR and tasks it aims to help investigate. Sec. 4 gives a status re- Roscosmos. The upmass is planned for 2015. port of the on-going Solex development. Finally, Sec. 5 provides Supvis-Justin’s outlook going forward. DLR’s participation in Meteron gives us an opportunity to contribute and build upon the knowledge gained from our previous space missions to the space robotics com- 2. SUPVIS JUSTIN: SUPERVISED AUTONOMY munity. One theme that is currently being investigated in WITH A HUMANOID ROBOT FROM SPACE the field space telerobotics is the use humanoid robots for space applications. A humanoid robot is inherently more Meteron Supvis-Justin [3], shown in Fig. 2, is spear- similar in form and kinematics to the human teleopera- headed by the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at tor. This feature makes the humanoid robot a uniquely DLR (DLR-RM), together with the ESA Telerobotics and suitable target for an immersing telepresence experience, as well supervised autonomy. NASA’s Robonaut [6] is a prime example of a humanoid robot designed for space deployment. Similarly, DLR’s extensive experience with humanoid robots [7] [8] has helped tremendously in our effort to design different experiment objectives to maxi- mize a robot’s relevant functionality in space teleopera- tion, whether with telepresence or supervised autonomy. This paper presents the on-going design and development of the experimental architecture for the Supvis-Justin su- pervised autonomy [9] [3] experiment, to be ready for a mission currently slated for 2016. An overview is given on the space-to-ground experiment architecture, as well as the robotics technology implemented for Supvis- Figure 3. Dexterous mobile humanoid robot for planetary Justin. surface tasks: DLR’s Rollin’ Justin. The highly dexterous capability is shown here by its fully sensorized arms and A key to gathering meaningful robot performance data hands, multiple vision system mounted in the head, a mo- comes into focus in this paper, through the introduction bile platform capable of coping with uneven terrain, and overall high degrees of freedom. Figure 4. Supvis-Justin experiment protocol 1 and 3: Figure 5. Supvis-Justin Protocol 2: SPU inspection and Survey and navigation tasks. The astronaut commands maintenance tasks. Once the robot reaches a target des- Rollin’ Justin to perform