Telerobotics head introduces Interact rover
André Schiele, head of ESA’s Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory and Associate of the Delft Robotics Institute introduces the robot rover key to his new experiment in his own words.
This is the Interact Centaur rover that ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen will be operating from orbit aboard the International Space Station, to drive into position and then perform an operation requiring sub-millimetre precision.
Developed by ESA’s Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory, the Interact Centaur is a 4×4 wheeled rover combining a camera head on a neck system, a pair of highly advanced force sensitive robotic arms designed for remote force-feedback-based operation and a number of proximity and localisation sensors.
As demonstrated here, Andreas will first attempt to guide the robot to locate an ‘operations task board’ and then to remove and plug a metal pin into it, which has a very tight mechanical fit and tolerance of only about 150 micrometres, less than a sixth of a millimetre.
As currently scheduled, Monday 7 September should see the Interact rover driven around the grounds of ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, from the extremely remote location of Earth orbit, 400 km up.
Signals between the crew and the robot must travel a total distance of approximately ninety thousand kilometres, via a satellite constellation located in geostationary orbit. Despite this distance, Andreas will exactly feel what the robot does on the surface – with only a very slight lag.
Which planet esa planned to "conquer"? In order to be effective the force feedback, I guess data travel on super fast net. How to deal with the latencies? Or maybe I missed some important detail of the video? Can you point me some link with details on these topics?
If you really want a task which will tell you about the fine details of your haptics…… A rig for telepresent guitar (bass might be a good one). If you can play guitar and modify tone/dynamics properly then you can do anything. Given that is a low latency task though, more than 150ms or so will be hard to play with.
Very impressive! Amazing job!
Wish that I could work with you guys!
How about installing a 360 degree camera on the rover, and have the operator wear a head mounted display (like the Oculus Rift of HTC Vive). That way the operator can just turn their head to look around and have a much deeper feeling of (tele)presence. Of course that setup is very sensitive to latency times, which probably makes it unusable.. but it's cool to think about. 🙂
I got excited about this rover though, please let us know how it performs!
i hope ESA is aiming to do this on the moon. i feel like ut has been overlooked, in favor of mars. however establishing a base on the moon is much easier, much safer, and with in situ resource gathering it would make a perfect refueling site. 😉 og ESA!
Thousands of years of evolution lead to this… we made a remote controlled space robot who can shove its mechanical weiner into a hole!