Astrobee System Overview

Overview of Astrobee System design and current status for the SPHERES/Astrobee Working Group quarterly meeting

Flexible Rover Architecture for Science Instrument Integration and Testing

At NASA Ames Research Center, the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) fields the K9 and K10 class rovers. Both use a mobile robot hardware architecture designed for extensibility and reconfigurability that allows for rapid changes in instrumentation and provides a high degree of modularity. Over the past ssveral years, we have worked with instrument developers at NASA centers, universities, and national laboratories to integrate or partially integrate their instruments onboard the K9 and K10 rovers. Early efforts required considerable interaction to work through integration issues such as power, data protocol and mechanical mounting. These interactions informed the design of our current avionics architecture, and have simplified more recent integration projects. In this paper, we will describe the IRG extensible avionics and software architecture and the effect it has had on our recent instrument integration efforts, including integration of four Mars Instrument Development Program devices

SPHERES: Synchronized, Position, Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites

SPHERES/Astrobee Working Group (SAWG) Quarterly meeting. Membership includes MIT, FIT, AFS, DARPA, CASIS, SJSU, and NASA (HQ, KSC, JSC, MSFC, and ARC) Face-to-Face, twice a year. The purpose is information sharing across the SPHERES community. Program office shares National Lab facility availability. Status of resources (batteries, CO2 tanks, etc.), overall calendar (scheduled Test Sessions, upmass return), and updates on new PD, investigations, and ISS infrastructure. Provide the SPHERES community (PD, investigators, etc.) with up-to-date information to determine opportunities to use the National Lab facility. Discuss proposed changes and updates to SPHERES National Lab which may be required to support a specific activity or research. Discuss specific support requests made to the ISS Office

SPHERES Synchronized, Position, Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellite

No abstract availabl

Surface Telerobotics: Development and Testing of a Crew Controlled Planetary Rover System

In planning for future exploration missions, architecture and study teams have made numerous assumptions about how crew can be telepresent on a planetary surface by remotely operating surface robots from space (i.e. from a flight vehicle or deep space habitat). These assumptions include estimates of technology maturity, existing technology gaps, and operational risks. These assumptions, however, have not been grounded by experimental data. Moreover, to date, no crew-controlled surface telerobot has been fully tested in a high-fidelity manner. To address these issues, we developed the "Surface Telerobotics" tests to do three things: 1) Demonstrate interactive crew control of a mobile surface telerobot in the presence of short communications delay. 2) Characterize a concept of operations for a single astronaut remotely operating a planetary rover with limited support from ground control. 3) Characterize system utilization and operator work-load for a single astronaut remotely operating a planetary rover with limited support from ground control

Flexible Rover Architecture for Science Instrument Integration and Testing

K9 and K10 class rovers. Both use a mobile robot hardware architecture designed for extensibility and reconfigurability that allows for rapid changes in instrumentation and provides a high degree of modularity. Over the past several years, we have worked with instrument developers at NASA centers, universities, and national laboratories to integrate or partially integrate their instruments onboard the K9 and K10 rovers. Early efforts required considerable interaction to work through integration issues such as power, data protocol and mechanical mounting. These interactions informed the design of our current avionics architecture, and have simplified more recent integration projects. In this paper, we will describe the IRG extensible avionics and software architecture and the effect it has had on our recent instrument integration efforts, including integration of four Mars Instrument Development Program devices. I

Field testing of utility robots for lunar surface operations

Background One of the central challenges for lunar exploration is to develop and validate the systems needed for lunar surface operations. In particular, outpost missions will require numerous tasks to be performed on the lunar surface that cannot be achieved through human EVA alone. For example, comprehensive site surveys (for site planning, resource prospecting, geological characterization, etc.) require hundreds of measurements and hundreds of hours of survey time. In comparison, the total duration of lunar surface EVA of Apollo 11 through 17 was approximately 80 hours. For the past three years, the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group has been developing teleoperated and supervised "utility" robots to perform routine, tedious, highly repetitive, and long duration tasks that would be unproductive for crew to perform manually. Our approach is to automate low-risk, site operations that do not normally require robots to operate in close, physical proximity to EVA crew and that do not require human-paced interaction or continuous control. Visual Inspection In 2006, we used the NASA Ames K10 planetary rover to perform a remote "walk-around" visual inspection of the NASA Johnson SCOUT crew rover Mapping Survey In July 2007, we used two K10 rovers to map several simulated lunar sites during a field test at Haughton Crater, Canada Rover operations were designed to simulate a near-term lunar mission, including use of orbital data, interactive robot user interfaces, and remote operations procedures for intra-vehicular activity (IVA) and ground-control. The Haughton-Mars Project base camp served as a proxy for a lunar outpost. During three weeks of operations, the two K10's drove a total distance of 45 km (almost entirely autonomously) and returned more than 25 GB of survey dat

Robotic Site Survey at Haughton Crater

In Summer 2007, we field-tested a robotic survey system at Haughton Crater (Devon Island, Canada). Two NASA Ames K10 planetary rovers performed systematic surveys of several simulated lunar sites, including a roughly 700m x 700m region called Drill Hill. The rovers carried a 3D scanning lidar for topographic mapping and ground penetrating radar to map subsurface structure. In this paper, we describe our robotic survey system, present the results of the field test, and summarize the lessons learned. 1