10th ESA Workshop on Advanced Space Technologies for Robotics and Automation ‘ASTRA 2008’ A Practical Demonstration of Advanced Teleoperation Techniques Applied to the Assembly of Payloads

The drive to planetary exploration, including re-visiting our own moon will inevitably require a level of interaction with these environments that is beyond previous robotic probes. To fully explore these hostile environments will require increasing levels of dexterity. This trend is already evident with the robotic sampling devices of Beagle2, EXOMARS & Mars Science Laboratory 2009. Payload assembly for planetary missions present their own unique challenges when the search for organic matter requires stringent aseptic environments, posing problems for human assembly. Advanced teleoperation for complex and delicate assembly and maintenance tasks has been pioneered at the JET nuclear fusion project for the past 15 years and this paper will present the results of a practical demonstration of its applicability to the highly dexterous remote assembly activities required for space relevant hardware. As a contribution to the ESA activities in the evaluation of Robotised AIV the authors considered the potential for exploitation of the developments made in teleoperation at JET. In particular the investigation sought to identify whether the high level of dexterity required for assembling delicate and complex space relevant components can be supplied using the state-ofthe-art terrestrial teleoperation methods. A challenge was issued to the authors to demonstrate the assembly of the following items:Spacecraft honeycomb panel with studs and inserts attached Solar Array Drive Motor (SADM) from Astrium Eurostar 2000 spacecraft with additional harness included Swab MLI blanket (in a 'tent' configuration) Blanket buttons (plastic retainers) Stainless steel standoffs Ty-base and ty-wrap An advanced Master-Slave manipulator was deployed and the activities were successfully completed by a single operator in one three hour session with no a-priori rehearsal and with no modification of the spacecraft items. The tasks included fully remote assembly of the above items with no external assistance and completion by post-terminal sterilisation also by teleoperation. The entire activity was photographed and recorded using video.