Lunar Volatiles Mobile Instrumentation (LUVMI) Project Results

LUVMI is an innovative, low mass, mobile robotic payload designed specifically for operations at the South Pole of the Moon with a range of several kilometres. Over the 2 past years of the project, the key LUVMI scientific instruments (volatiles analyser and volatiles sampler) were successfully developed and validated up to TRL 5-6. In addition, a ground prototype of the LUVMI rover was developed and tested in a series of outdoor trials, in rocky and sandy environments. This rover, with a target dry mass of ~40kg for a flight version, features an adjustable height chassis to adapt to terrain roughness and allowing to bring instruments very closely and precisely to the surface. The locomotion capability of the LUVMI rover was tested in partially representative conditions, as part of the project. This paper reports on the project’s results and lessons learnt, and gives indications of how LUVMI may be further matured to target potential mission slots in the mid-2020s, as part of ESA mission and/or supported by private funding

Assessing the Distribution of Water Ice and Other Volatiles at the Lunar South Pole with LUVMI-X: A Mission Concept

The search for exploitable deposits of water and other volatiles at the Moon’s poles has intensified considerably in recent years, due to the renewed strong interest in lunar exploration. With the return of humans to the lunar surface on the horizon, the use of locally available resources to support long-term and sustainable exploration programs, encompassing both robotic and crewed elements, has moved into focus of public and private actors alike. Our current knowledge about the distribution and concentration of water and other volatiles in the lunar rocks and regolith is, however, too limited to assess the feasibility and economic viability of resource-extraction efforts. On a more fundamental level, we currently lack sufficiently detailed data to fully understand the origins of lunar water and its migration to the polar regions. In this paper, we present LUVMI-X, a mission concept intended to address the shortage of in situ data on volatiles on the Moon that results from a recently concluded design study. Its central element is a compact rover equipped with complementary instrumentation capable of investigating both the surface and shallow subsurface of illuminated and shadowed areas at the lunar south pole. We describe the rover and instrument design, the mission’s operational concept, and a preliminary landing-site analysis. We also discuss how LUVMI-X fits into the diverse landscape of lunar missions under development

Introduction to Surface Avatar: the First Heterogeneous Robotic Team to be Commanded with Scalable Autonomy from the ISS

Robotics is vital to the continued development toward Lunar and Martian exploration, in-situ resource utilization, and surface infrastructure construction. Large-scale extra-terrestrial missions will require teams of robots with different, complementary capabilities, together with a powerful, intuitive user interface for effective commanding. We introduce Surface Avatar, the newest ISS-to-Earth telerobotic experiment series, to be conducted in 2022-2024. Spearheaded by DLR, together with ESA, Surface Avatar builds on expertise on commanding robots with different levels of autonomy from our past telerobotic experiments: Kontur-2, Haptics, Interact, SUPVIS Justin, and Analog-1. A team of four heterogeneous robots in a multi-site analog environment at DLR are at the command of a crew member on the ISS. The team has a humanoid robot for dexterous object handling, construction and maintenance; a rover for long traverses and sample acquisition; a quadrupedal robot for scouting and exploring difficult terrains; and a lander with robotic arm for component delivery and sample stowage. The crew's command terminal is multimodal, with an intuitive graphical user interface, 3-DOF joystick, and 7-DOF input device with force-feedback. The autonomy of any robot can be scaled up and down depending on the task and the astronaut's preference: acting as an avatar of the crew in haptically-coupled telepresence, or receiving task-level commands like an intelligent co-worker. Through crew performing collaborative tasks in exploration and construction scenarios, we hope to gain insight into how to optimally command robots in a future space mission. This paper presents findings from the first preliminary session in June 2022, and discusses the way forward in the planned experiment sessions

MEG evidence for dynamic amygdala modulations by gaze and facial emotions.

Amygdala is a key brain region for face perception. While the role of amygdala in the perception of facial emotion and gaze has been extensively highlighted with fMRI, the unfolding in time of amydgala responses to emotional versus neutral faces with different gaze directions is scarcely known.Here we addressed this question in healthy subjects using MEG combined with an original source imaging method based on individual amygdala volume segmentation and the localization of sources in the amygdala volume. We found an early peak of amygdala activity that was enhanced for fearful relative to neutral faces between 130 and 170 ms. The effect of emotion was again significant in a later time range (310-350 ms). Moreover, the amygdala response was greater for direct relative averted gaze between 190 and 350 ms, and this effect was selective of fearful faces in the right amygdala.Altogether, our results show that the amygdala is involved in the processing and integration of emotion and gaze cues from faces in different time ranges, thus underlining its role in multiple stages of face perception

EnViSoRS: Enhanced Vision System for Robotic Surgery. A User-Defined Safety Volume Tracking to Minimize the Risk of Intraoperative Bleeding

In abdominal surgery, intraoperative bleeding is one of the major complications that affect the outcome of minimally invasive surgical procedures. One of the causes is attributed to accidental damages to arteries or veins, and one of the possible risk factors falls on the surgeon’s skills. This paper presents the development and application of an Enhanced Vision System for Robotic Surgery (EnViSoRS), based on a user-defined Safety Volume (SV) tracking to minimize the risk of intraoperative bleeding. It aims at enhancing the surgeon’s capabilities by providing Augmented Reality (AR) assistance toward the protection of vessels from injury during the execution of surgical procedures with a robot. The core of the framework consists in (i) a hybrid tracking algorithm (LT-SAT tracker) that robustly follows a user-defined Safety Area (SA) in long term; (ii) a dense soft tissue 3D reconstruction algorithm, necessary for the computation of the SV; (iii) AR features for visualization of the SV to be protected and of a graphical gage indicating the current distance between the instruments and the reconstructed surface. EnViSoRS was integrated with a commercial robotic surgical system (the dVRK system) for testing and validation. The experiments aimed at demonstrating the accuracy, robustness, performance, and usability of EnViSoRS during the execution of a simulated surgical task on a liver phantom. Results show an overall accuracy in accordance with surgical requirements (<5 mm), and high robustness in the computation of the SV in terms of precision and recall of its identification. The optimization strategy implemented to speed up the computational time is also described and evaluated, providing AR features update rate up to 4 fps, without impacting the real-time visualization of the stereo endoscopic video. Finally, qualitative results regarding the system usability indicate that the proposed system integrates well with the commercial surgical robot and has indeed potential to offer useful assistance during real surgeries

Advanced User Interface for Augmented Information Display on Endoscopic Surgical Images

Advanced User Interface for Augmented Information Display on Endoscopic Surgical Image

Design and Integration of Electrical Bio-impedance Sensing in Surgical Robotic Tools for Tissue Identification and Display

The integration of intra-operative sensors into surgical robots is a hot research topic since this can significantly facilitate complex surgical procedures by enhancing surgical awareness with real-time tissue information. However, currently available intra-operative sensing technologies are mainly based on image processing and force feedback, which normally require heavy computation or complicated hardware modifications of existing surgical tools. This paper presents the design and integration of electrical bio-impedance sensing into a commercial surgical robot tool, leading to the creation of a novel smart instrument that allows the identification of tissues by simply touching them. In addition, an advanced user interface is designed to provide guidance during the use of the system and to allow augmented-reality visualization of the tissue identification results. The proposed system imposes minor hardware modifications to an existing surgical tool, but adds the capability to provide a wealth of data about the tissue being manipulated. This has great potential to allow the surgeon (or an autonomous robotic system) to better understand the surgical environment. To evaluate the system, a series of ex-vivo experiments were conducted. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed sensing system can successfully identify different tissue types with 100% classification accuracy. In addition, the user interface was shown to effectively and intuitively guide the user to measure the electrical impedance of the target tissue, presenting the identification results as augmented-reality markers for simple and immediate recognition