The Sixth Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1992)

This document contains papers presented at the Space Operations, Applications, and Research Symposium (SOAR) hosted by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) on 4-6 Aug. 1992 and held at the JSC Gilruth Recreation Center. The symposium was cosponsored by the Air Force Material Command and by NASA/JSC. Key technical areas covered during the symposium were robotic and telepresence, automation and intelligent systems, human factors, life sciences, and space maintenance and servicing. The SOAR differed from most other conferences in that it was concerned with Government-sponsored research and development relevant to aerospace operations. The symposium's proceedings include papers covering various disciplines presented by experts from NASA, the USAF, universities, and industry

Flexible Supervised Autonomy for Exploration in Subterranean Environments

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.Comment: Field Robotics special issue: DARPA Subterranean Challenge, Advancement and Lessons Learned from the Final

Conference on Intelligent Robotics in Field, Factory, Service, and Space (CIRFFSS 1994), volume 1

The AIAA/NASA Conference on Intelligent Robotics in Field, Factory, Service, and Space (CIRFFSS '94) was originally proposed because of the strong belief that America's problems of global economic competitiveness and job creation and preservation can partly be solved by the use of intelligent robotics, which are also required for human space exploration missions. Individual sessions addressed nuclear industry, agile manufacturing, security/building monitoring, on-orbit applications, vision and sensing technologies, situated control and low-level control, robotic systems architecture, environmental restoration and waste management, robotic remanufacturing, and healthcare applications

Surface Geometry and the Haptic Rendering of Rigid Point Contacts

This thesis examines the haptic rendering of rigid point contacts in virtual simulations. The haptic renderers generate force feedback so that the operator can interact with the virtual scenes in a realistic way. They must be able to recreate the physical phenomena experienced in the real world without displaying any haptic artifacts. The existing renderers are decomposed into a projection function and a regulation scheme. It is shown that the pop-through artifact, whereby the virtual tool instantaneously jumps between two distant surface points, is caused whenever the operator encounters a singularity within the renderer's projection function. This was well known for the minimum distance based renderers, but it is shown here that such singularities arise with the constraint based renderers as well. A new projection function is designed to minimize the existence of singularities within the model. When paired with an appropriate regulation scheme, this forms the proposed mapping renderer. The new projection is calculated by mapping the model onto a canonical shape where the haptic problem is trivial, e.g. a circle in the case of a 2D model of genus zero, which avoids pop-through on smooth models. The haptic problem is then recast as a virtual constraint problem, where the traditional regulation schemes, designed originally for planar surfaces, are shown to introduce a velocity dependent error on curved surfaces that can distort the model's rendering and to couple the regulation towards and dynamics along the constraint. Set stabilization control, based on feedback linearizing the haptic device with respect to a virtual output consisting of coordinates transversal and tangential to the model surface, is proposed as an alternative. It is shown to be able to decouple the system into transversal and tangential subsystems that can then be made asymptotically stable and assigned arbitrary dynamics, respectively

Trust in Robots

Robots are increasingly becoming prevalent in our daily lives within our living or working spaces. We hope that robots will take up tedious, mundane or dirty chores and make our lives more comfortable, easy and enjoyable by providing companionship and care. However, robots may pose a threat to human privacy, safety and autonomy; therefore, it is necessary to have constant control over the developing technology to ensure the benevolent intentions and safety of autonomous systems. Building trust in (autonomous) robotic systems is thus necessary. The title of this book highlights this challenge: “Trust in robots—Trusting robots”. Herein, various notions and research areas associated with robots are unified. The theme “Trust in robots” addresses the development of technology that is trustworthy for users; “Trusting robots” focuses on building a trusting relationship with robots, furthering previous research. These themes and topics are at the core of the PhD program “Trust Robots” at TU Wien, Austria

Seventh Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1993), volume 1

This document contains papers presented at the Space Operations, Applications and Research Symposium (SOAR) Symposium hosted by NASA/Johnson Space Center (JSC) on August 3-5, 1993, and held at JSC Gilruth Recreation Center. SOAR included NASA and USAF programmatic overview, plenary session, panel discussions, panel sessions, and exhibits. It invited technical papers in support of U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Department of Energy, NASA, and USAF programs in the following areas: robotics and telepresence, automation and intelligent systems, human factors, life support, and space maintenance and servicing. SOAR was concerned with Government-sponsored research and development relevant to aerospace operations. More than 100 technical papers, 17 exhibits, a plenary session, several panel discussions, and several keynote speeches were included in SOAR '93

A development environment for operational concepts and systems engineering analysis.

The work reported in this document involves a development effort to provide combat commanders and systems engineers with a capability to explore and optimize system concepts that include operational concepts as part of the design effort. An infrastructure and analytic framework has been designed and partially developed that meets a gap in systems engineering design for combat related complex systems. The system consists of three major components: The first component consists of a design environment that permits the combat commander to perform 'what-if' types of analyses in which parts of a course of action (COA) can be automated by generic system constructs. The second component consists of suites of optimization tools designed to integrate into the analytical architecture to explore the massive design space of an integrated design and operational space. These optimization tools have been selected for their utility in requirements development and operational concept development. The third component involves the design of a modeling paradigm for the complex system that takes advantage of functional definitions and the coupled state space representations, generic measures of effectiveness and performance, and a number of modeling constructs to maximize the efficiency of computer simulations. The system architecture has been developed to allow for a future extension in which the operational concept development aspects can be performed in a co-evolutionary process to ensure the most robust designs may be gleaned from the design space(s)

NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship Program

This document is a collection of technical reports on research conducted by the participants in the 1996 NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship Program at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). This was the twelfth year that a NASA/ASEE program has been conducted at KSC. The 1996 program was administered by the University of Central Florida in cooperation with KSC. The program was operated under the auspices of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) with sponsorship and funding from the Office of Educational Affairs, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC and KSC. The KSC Program was one of nine such Aeronautics and Space Research Program funded by NASA in 1996. The NASA/ASEE Program is intended to be a two-year program to allow in-depth research by the University faculty member. The editors of this document were responsible for selecting appropriately qualified faculty to address some of the many problems of current interest to NASA/KSC