A Danish astronaut aboard the global Space Station has successfully pulled off a big advance in technology: controlling a robot from space.
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Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen performed the experiment in which he placed a peg into a very tight hole under the careful control of the European Space Agency. The rover sports a 4 X 4 design, a camera “head” and two highly-dexterous robotic arms equipped with force-feedback sensors with which to manipulate the target object.
Mogensen had to direct the peg into a hole that only had less than a sixth of a millimeter of wiggle room, a task which took several concentrated moments to achieve.
For the first time – thanks to force-feedback technology – when the pin was not aligned correctly Mogensen felt it hit the sides of the hole via the joystick he was operating on the space station. This is where the human-to-robot haptic technology could help, by allowing humans to feel their way through and fix problems.
“He had never operated the rover before but its controls turned out to be very intuitive” states André Schiele, of ESA’s Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory.
He explained that with space engineers hoping to fly people to Mars at some point in the future, scientists need to find a way to bring them back.
Robots like the Centaur – also affectionately dubbed the “blue bug” by some of its designers – could be put in place first to do the building.
The station’s only permanent member is the Robonaut 2 humanoid robot, developed as a joint project by Nasa and DARPA to work alongside astronauts, which was delivered in February 2011 with the aim of helping the astronauts with tasks requiring dexterity.
The technology has more immediate benefits to humanity however.
The Interact Centaur rover used for the experiment was designed and constructed as part of a collaboration between ESA engineers and graduate students from the Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands.
Individual actions can be combined into procedures and stored in the robot’s autobiographical memory, which makes it possible to date and locate memories and determine who was present during the event, enabling the robot to reproduce them for other humans when required. Robots controlled in such a way can cap undersea oil wells or clean up the results of a nuclear accident.
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‘Everything starts to deform making it hard for robots to complete a task which they have been programmed for, ‘ he said.
