A Unified Ground Control and Programming Methodology for Space Robotics Applications - Demonstrations on ETS-VII

Abstract

The paper outlines the main features of DLR’s ground control station for space robotics applications. It combines sensorbased task-level teleprogramming with the features of teleoperation and shared autonomy. 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 task-directed programming scheme, which provides a very flexible architecture to adapt the applicationspecific requirements to a given controlling scheme. To demonstrate the power of our system, we describe the results of the GETEX experiment, which was performed in April ’99 at the first free-floating space robot on NASDA’s ETS-VII satellite 1 .