Semi-autonomous Telerobotic Manipulation: A Viable Approach for Space Structure Deployment and Maintenance

Future space explorations necessitate manipulation of space structures in support of extra vehicular activities or extraterrestrial resource exploitation. In these tasks robots are expected to assist or replace human crew to alleviate human risk and enhance task performance. However due to the vastly unstructured and unpredictable environmental conditions, automation of robotic task is virtually impossible and thus teleoperation is expected to be employed. However teleoperation is extremely slow and inefficient. To improve task efficiency of teleoperation, this work introduces semi-autonomous telerobotic operation technology. Key technological innovations include implementation of reactive agent based robotic architecture and enhanced operator interface that renders virtual fixture.