KONTUR-2: Force-feedback teleoperation from the international space station

Abstract

This paper presents a new robot controller for space telerobotics missions specially designed to meet the requirements of KONTUR-2, a German & Russian telerobotics mission that addressed scientific and technological questions for future planetary explorations. In KONTUR-2, Earth and ISS have been used as a test-bed to evaluate and demonstrate a new technology for real-time telemanipulation from space. During the August 2015' experiments campaign, a cosmonaut teleoperated a robot manipulator located in Germany, using a force-feedback joystick from the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS). The focus of the paper is on the design and performance of the bilateral controller between ISS joystick and Earth robot. The controller is based on a 4-Channels architecture in which stability is guaranteed through passivity and the Time Delay Power Network (TDPN) concept. We show how the proposed approach successfully fulfills mission requirements, specially those related to system operation through space links and internet channels, involving time delays and data losses of different nature.

Multi-DoF Time Domain Passivity Approach Based Drift Compensation for Telemanipulation

“…Despite being able to autonomously fulfill a significant range of objectives, state-of-the-art robots still need human assistance to perform more complex or unforeseen tasks [1]. The level of human participation in robotic tasks can range from supervised autonomy [2] to direct teleoperation [3]. In the latter, an important characteristic of the telemanipulation setup is to be able to passively interact with the environment and the human operator.…”

Knowledge Driven Orbit-to-Ground Teleoperation of a Robot Coworker

“…In 2015-2017, DLR and Roscosmos investigated a telepresence approach for crewed command of surface robots in the Kontur-2 project [16] [17]. A 2-Degree Of Freedom (DOF) force-feedback joystick for commanding surface robots from microgravity was evaluated in 33 ISS sessions.…”

Reducing the conservatism of the time domain passivity approach through consideration of energy reflection in delayed coupled network systems

“…The TDPA for passivity control of the delay in a 2-Channel teleoperation system was introduced in [5]. The authors of [6,7,8] extended the TDPA for the application in more complex teleoperation architectures. In [9], the conventional TDPA has been applied to an industrial, multilateral, multi-DoF teleoperation scenario.…”