Supporting Human-Robot Teams in Space Missions Using ePartners and Formal Abstraction Hierarchies

Human space flight is a prototypical example of a complex, dynamic, and safety-critical domain in which missions are performed by collaborative teams of humans and technical systems. In such domains, intelligent electronic partners (ePartners) can play a useful role in supporting human-robot teams in their problem solving process whenever a non-nominal situation is encountered. To enhance the supportive capabilities of such ePartners, this paper presents an approach to formally represent the functionality of human-robot teams in terms of different levels of abstraction. By establishing formal relations between domain knowledge at different abstraction levels and introducing reasoning rules to navigate through these relations, ePartners are endowed with a number of supportive functions, such as the ability to reason about the mission status, make suggestions in non-nominal situations, and provide explanations. The approach is applied to a use case in the context of a manned space mission to Mars. It has been implemented within a mobile application to assist robot-astronaut teams during space missions, and has been tested in a pilot experiment at the European Space Research and Technology Centre.

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