Audio Perception in Robotic Assistance for Human Space Exploration: A Feasibility Study

Future crewed missions beyond low earth orbit will greatly rely on the support of robotic assistance platforms to perform inspection and manipulation of critical assets. This includes crew habitats, landing sites or assets for life support and operation. Maintenance and manipulation of a crewed site in extra-terrestrial environments is a complex task and the system will have to face different challenges during operation. While most may be solved autonomously, in certain occasions human intervention will be required. The telerobotic demonstration mission, Surface Avatar, led by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), with partner European Space Agency (ESA), investigates different approaches offering astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) control of ground robots in representative scenarios, e.g. a Martian landing and exploration site. In this work we present a feasibility study on how to integrate auditory information into the mentioned application. We will discuss methods for obtaining audio information and localizing audio sources in the environment, as well as fusing auditory and visual information to perform state estimation based on the gathered data. We demonstrate our work in different experiments to show the effectiveness of utilizing audio information, the results of spectral analysis of our mission assets, and how this information could help future astronauts to argue about the current mission situation

Extending the Knowledge Driven Approach for Scalable Autonomy Teleoperation of a Robotic Avatar

Crewed missions to celestial bodies such as Moon and Mars are in the focus of an increasing number of space agencies. Precautions to ensure a safe landing of the crew on the extraterrestrial surface, as well as reliable infrastructure on the remote location, for bringing the crew back home are key considerations for mission planning. The European Space Agency (ESA) identified in its Terrae Novae 2030+ roadmap, that robots are needed as precursors and scouts to ensure the success of such missions. An important role these robots will play, is the support of the astronaut crew in orbit to carry out scientific work, and ultimately ensuring nominal operation of the support infrastructure for astronauts on the surface. The METERON SUPVIS Justin ISS experiments demonstrated that supervised autonomy robot command can be used for executing inspection, maintenance and installation tasks using a robotic co-worker on the planetary surface. The knowledge driven approach utilized in the experiments only reached its limits when situations arise that were not anticipated by the mission design. In deep space scenarios, the astronauts must be able to overcome these limitations. An approach towards more direct command of a robot was demonstrated in the METERON ANALOG-1 ISS experiment. In this technical demonstration, an astronaut used haptic telepresence to command a robotic avatar on the surface to execute sampling tasks. In this work, we propose a system that combines supervised autonomy and telepresence by extending the knowledge driven approach. The knowledge management is based on organizing the prior knowledge of the robot in an object-centered context. Action Templates are used to define the knowledge on the handling of the objects on a symbolic and geometric level. This robot-agnostic system can be used for supervisory command of any robotic coworker. By integrating the robot itself as an object into the object-centered domain, robot-specific skills and (tele-)operation modes can be injected into the existing knowledge management system by formulating respective Action Templates. In order to efficiently use advanced teleoperation modes, such as haptic telepresence, a variety of input devices are integrated into the proposed system. This work shows how the integration of these devices is realized in a way that is agnostic to the input devices and operation modes. The proposed system is evaluated in the Surface Avatar ISS experiment. This work shows how the system is integrated into a Robot Command Terminal featuring a 3-Degree-of-Freedom Joystick and a 7-Degree-of-Freedom haptic input device in the Columbus module of the ISS. In the preliminary experiment sessions of Surface Avatar, two astronauts on orbit took command of the humanoid service robot Rollin' Justin in Germany. This work presents and discusses the results of these ISS-to-ground sessions and derives requirements for extending the scalable autonomy system for the use with a heterogeneous robotic team

On Realizing Multi-Robot Command through Extending the Knowledge Driven Teleoperation Approach

Future crewed planetary missions will strongly depend on the support of crew-assistance robots for setup and inspection of critical assets, such as return vehicles, before and after crew arrival. To efficiently accomplish a high variety of tasks, we envision the use of a heterogeneous team of robots to be commanded on various levels of autonomy. This work presents an intuitive and versatile command concept for such robot teams using a multi-modal Robot Command Terminal (RCT) on board a crewed vessel. We employ an object-centered prior knowledge management that stores the information on how to deal with objects around the robot. This includes knowledge on detecting, reasoning on, and interacting with the objects. The latter is organized in the form of Action Templates (ATs), which allow for hybrid planning of a task, i.e. reasoning on the symbolic and the geometric level to verify the feasibility and find a suitable parameterization of the involved actions. Furthermore, by also treating the robots as objects, robot-specific skillsets can easily be integrated by embedding the skills in ATs. A Multi-Robot World State Representation (MRWSR) is used to instantiate actual objects and their properties. The decentralized synchronization of the MRWSR of multiple robots supports task execution when communication between all participants cannot be guaranteed. To account for robot-specific perception properties, information is stored independently for each robot, and shared among all participants. This enables continuous robot- and command-specific decision on which information to use to accomplish a task. A Mission Control instance allows to tune the available command possibilities to account for specific users, robots, or scenarios. The operator uses an RCT to command robots based on the object-based knowledge representation, whereas the MRWSR serves as a robot-agnostic interface to the planetary assets. The selection of a robot to be commanded serves as top-level filter for the available commands. A second filter layer is applied by selecting an object instance. These filters reduce the multitude of available commands to an amount that is meaningful and handleable for the operator. Robot-specific direct teleoperation skills are accessible via their respective AT, and can be mapped dynamically to available input devices. Using AT-specific parameters provided by the robot for each input device allows a robot-agnostic usage, as well as different control modes e.g. velocity, model-mediated, or domain-based passivity control based on the current communication characteristics. The concept will be evaluated on board the ISS within the Surface Avatar experiments

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

Preliminary Results for the Multi-Robot, Multi-Partner, Multi-Mission, Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Mount Etna

This paper was initially intended to report on the outcome of the twice postponed demonstration mission of the ARCHES project. Due to the global COVID pandemic, it has been postponed from 2020, then 2021, to 2022. Nevertheless, the development of our concepts and integration has progressed rapidly, and some of the preliminary results are worthwhile to share with the community to drive the dialog on robotics planetary exploration strategies. This paper includes an overview of the planned 4-week campaign, as well as the vision and relevance of the missiontowards the planned official space missions. Furthermore, the cooperative aspect of the robotic teams, the scientific motivation, the sub task achievements are summarised

Finally! Insights into the ARCHES Lunar Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Etna in summer 2022

This paper summarises the first outcomes of the space demonstration mission of the ARCHES project which could have been performed this year from 13 june until 10 july on Italy’s Mt. Etna in Sicily. After the second postponement related to COVID from the initially for 2020 planed campaign, we are now very happy to report, that the whole campaign with more than 65 participants for four weeks has been successfully conduced. In this short overview paper, we will refer to all other publication here on IAC22. This paper includes an overview of the performed 4-week campaign and the achieved mission goals and first results but also share our findings on the organisational and planning aspects

Reconstructing Human Hand Pose and Configuration using a Fixed-Base Exoskeleton

Accurate real-time estimation of the pose and configuration of the human hand attached to a dexterous haptic input device is crucial to improve the interaction possibilities for teleoperation and in virtual and augmented reality. In this paper, we present an approach to reconstruct the pose of the human hand and the joint angles of the fingers when wearing a novel fixed-base (grounded) hand exoskeleton. Using a kinematic model of the human hand built from MRI data, we can reconstruct the hand pose and joint angles without sensors on the human hand, from attachment points on the first three fingers and the palm. We test the accuracy of our approach using motion capture as a ground truth. This reconstruction can be used to determine contact geometry and force-feedback from virtual or remote objects in virtual reality or teleoperation