Recent scientific discoveries about the presence of water-ice on moon have led to an increased interest in lunar space missions. For the construction and maintenance of future lunar bases, robotic technologies will become crucial. Teleoperation of robotic systems is an established technology that allows an operator to control a remote robot from a dislocated operator station. The level of emersion of the operator in the remote scene can be significantly increased by the use of haptic feedback. However, for ground-based teleoperation of a lunar robot, significant time delays in the order of several seconds occur, which prevent nowadays teleoperation technology to be applied in such scenarios. While effective control frameworks are available to handle delays up to ~1s, the performance of these algorithms drastically degrades when the delay increases.

The LunarAssembly project treats a fundamental scientific challenge, namely the teleoperation of robotic systems under large time delays, motivated by a scenario of remote assembly on the Moon. We believe that such high delays require novel paradigms for teleoperation with an appropriate interplay between autonomous functions and human intervention. We will develop fundamental extensions of the time-domain passivity framework with the aim of improving transparency under high time delay. These novel control algorithms are combined with a curriculum-based framework for incremental learning of autonomous skills, leveraging recent progress in ML for robotics. All this will be enabled by XR technologies based on 3D reconstruction of the remote environment. Besides the progress in these individual research fields, we believe that an innovation also lies in the appropriate interplay of these technologies.

Project partners:

• ICT Autonomous Systems Lab (TU Wien)
• ACIN Robotic Systems Lab (TU Wien)
• Space Robotics Research Group, SnT, University of Luxembourg

Funding Organization:

Austrian Science Fund (FWF)