A Universal Task Level Ground Control and Programming System for Space Robot Applications - The MARCO Concept and it's Application to the ETS VII Project

Abstract

The paper outlines the main features of DLR's ground control station for space robotics applications. It combines sensorbased task-level teleprogramming (as the basis for autonomy) with the features of teleoperation and shared autonomy. The hierarchical system structure is shown as well as the flexibility in programming and controlling each kind of space robotics application. The teaching by showing approach is the key to a easy-to-use programming interface at different levels of space robot controlling. This approach has led to a modular taskdirected programming scheme, called Modular A&R Controller (MARCO), which provides a very flexible architecture to adapt the application-specific requirements to a given controlling scheme. To demonstrate the power of MARCO, we describe the results of the GETEX experiment, which has been performed in April '99 at the first freefloating space robot on NASDA's ETS-VII satellite'.