07.30.13
6:30 AM
NASA's K-10 rover maneuvers around the Roverscape, a pebbly field at the Ames Research Center full of obstacles such as boulders, fake rocks, and steep slopes.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – On a pebbled field built next to a parking lot, a small rover scoots forward and expels a long sheet of polyimide plastic from its backside, the third film the probe has deployed. The sheets are arranged in a Y-shaped formation that simulates a radio antenna on the moon.
No one is around to direct the seemingly autonomous robot. But the entire operation is being remote-controlled by Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, who is flying 400 kilometers overhead in the International Space Station.
This is the second in a series of tests at NASA’s Ames Research Center aimed at taking the next giant leap in humans and robots working together. A technology known as telerobotics may one day allow astronauts to stay in orbit while guiding robots in real time on the surface of another planet. It will let humans explore new places, including perhaps unreachable locations such as the boiling valleys of Venus or the icy oceans of Europa, while lowering the risk to their lives. With a human mind in the loop, the robots will be able to make much quicker decisions and overcome obstacles to range farther than ever before.
“This is a glimpse of the future of space exploration,” said astronomer Jack Burns of the University of Colorado, during the test on July 26.
During the test at Ames, NASA’s K-10 rover is outfitted with an array of sensors. The 1.4-meter-tall robot has several cameras and an overhead LIDAR scanner to build a 3-D map of its environment, and a sophisticated suite of software to help it get around. Parmitano isn’t driving the probe with a joystick up there. He punches instructions on a laptop, telling the robot to go from point A to point B, and K-10 figures out the best path to avoid obstacles and lay down the radio antenna.
In Burns’ vision, within 10 years, astronauts in orbit around the moon could be deploying a much larger version of this radio telescope on the lunar far side. With such an instrument, astronomers could glimpse some of the earliest periods in our universe’s history, when the first stars and galaxies formed. Currently, both ground- and space-based telescopes experience too much radio noise from human technology and the Earth’s ionosphere to get a clear picture of this era. Because the moon acts as a giant shield, the lunar far side is the only place in the inner solar system quiet enough to see this cosmic dawn. Telerobotics would allow NASA to build a radio telescope on the moon for cheaper than it might otherwise.
NASA is currently building a new generation of enormous rockets, the Space Launch System, which could eventually dwarf the Saturn V that launched Apollo astronauts to the moon. By 2021, it may be ready to carry its first crew beyond low-Earth orbit. Burns wants that first mission to go to the far side of the moon, a place humans have hardly explored, set up a 50 to 100 meter radio antenna, and conduct important geological investigations of the moon’s South Pole Aiken Basin, one of the largest impact craters in the solar system.
In trying to convince NASA to seamlessly bring together human and robotic exploration, Burns has a partner in crime: engineer Terry Fong, leader of the agency’s telerobotics group and a self-professed robot geek at heart.
In an ideal telerobotics situation, human operators control a probe on another planet in real time. For the Curiosity rover, currently on Mars, NASA engineers have to send a complex set of instructions to the robot each morning and wait patiently while it executes them. Because it takes light between seven and 20 minutes to travel between Earth and Mars, any problems or change in commands take a very long time to work out and the rover does everything at an extremely slow pace. Furthermore, a large team of engineers is required at mission control to monitor and instruct the robot.
“With this test, it’s the complete opposite,” said Fong. “We have a single operator” who can make changes on the fly and react to unexpected situations with the creativity and problem-solving skills of the human mind.
From his perch on the space station, Parmitano controlled the robot with a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop showing an up-to-the-minute 3-D model of the area around the K-10. Contradicting the idea that everything in space exploration is always state-of-the-art, Fong mentioned the laptop was running Windows XP. But like a good app developer, Fong and his team want to ensure their control system is user friendly. Parmitano only saw the interface he was using to drive the K-10 two hours before the test began, yet he was able to move the robot deftly and accomplish all the required goals fairly quickly.
Fong hopes to develop telerobotics protocols for more than just space exploration. As some Silicon Valley bosses are finding out, it’s easier to send a robot surrogate into the office for you when you’re far away. The remote-controlled robot can navigate the halls and interact with employees.
“It’s the same sorts of obstacles that you have to get around in an office or on another planet,” Fong said.
There are many more situations on Earth where you could send a robot to more safely do what is now a man’s job. One day, advanced human-controlled probes could go exploring deep underground or at the bottom of the ocean, assess and fix damage after a Fukushima-type disaster, operate search-and-rescue when a building collapses, or perform emergency surgery on a battlefield.
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