Automatic Robot Supervision within a Lunar Crater Environment

The DFKI RIC built an artificial lunar crater scenery to create an experiment environment for exploration robots. This test facility called Space Testbed is equipped with a wide range of supervision tools. The presented paper describes a concept to control these tools automatically in order to support the operators. For this purpose, a motion tracking system is used to focus the Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras on the robot. Furthermore, a gantry crane is controlled by a tracking algorithm to keep a vertical position above the robot to allow a constant top view.