JIETSSP: Coordination of Robotic Teams for Space Solar Power Assembly Operations

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Assembly of Space Solar Power facilities will be significantly more complex and demanding than any prior on-orbit assembly. While it is evident that human workers will not be able to construct such facilities directly, alternatives involving many robot teams and few human supervisors are not yet mature. To succeed in this enterprise, revolutionary new capabilities are needed in areas such as autonomous robotic assembly and human-robot interaction. This project will seek fundamental new insights and demonstrations of how Space Solar Power (SSP) facilities can be built using autonomous robots supervised by humans. It will have two main objectives, important to the future of Space Solar Power assembly: Enable heterogeneous multiple robots to coordinate in the performance of complex tasks, such as assembly~ Enable flexible human-robot interaction during assembly operations to deal contingencies that cannot be anticipated. For some of the key tasks, such as moving substructures, autonomous control is already feasible. For other aspects, such as fine manipulation to connect components, human perception and control is needed. The PI seek to develop a general framework, which they term sliding autonomy, where any subtask, on any of the robots, can be performed either autonomously or by a tele-operator, depending on the situation. The framework will enable mixed-initiative decision making: Human users can decide to take control, if they want, and the autonomous systems can decide to hand over control, when they need help. This project will utilize an existing robotic testbed, developed for a previous NASA program, consisting of three heterogeneous robots (a crane, a mobile manipulator. and a roving eye) that are used for autonomous assembly. It will demonstrate several basic assembly tasks, such as docking beams and stringing cables. It will quantify the advantages of sliding autonomy for this task, in terms of time spent and success ratio. A clear improvement in efficiency will demonstrate the feasibility of such assembly for Space Solar Power facilities.