Multisensory telerobotic techniques

The paper outlines the telerobotic concepts as presently developed for a small multisensory robot to fly with the next spacelab mission D2; the robot is supposed to work in an autonomous mode, teleoperated by astronauts, and teleoperated from ground. Its key feature is a recently developed multisensory gripper with highly integrated, miniaturized sensor technology including stiff and compliant six-axis force-torque sensing, 9 laser range finders (one of them realized as a rotating laser scanner), tactile arrays, grasp force control and a stero camera pair. Perfect modularity in hard- and software with all preprocessing electronics realized in the gripper was one the major design goals. This multisensory information is a key issue when teleoperating the robot from ground. Sensory simulation on ground computers using advanced stereo graphics is supposed to predict the sensorbased path refinement as induced by the real sensors on board. A particularly interesting situation occurs in the experiment”grasping a floating object from ground” with overall delays of more than 4 seconds. Predictive simulation using realtime fusion of stereo images and laserscan information is the challenging technique envisioned here.