Paul G. Backes

The Rocky 7 rover: a Mars sciencecraft prototype

This paper describes the design and implementation at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of a small rover for future Mars missions requiring long traverses and rover-based science experiments. The small rover prototype, called Rocky 7, is capable of long traverses, autonomous navigation, and science instrument control. This rover carries three science instruments, and can be commanded from any computer platform from any location using the World Wide Web. In this paper we describe the mobility system, the sampling system, the sensor suite, navigation and control, onboard science instruments, and the ground command and control system. We also present key accomplishments of a recent field test of Rocky 7 in the Mojave Desert in California.

UMI: an interactive supervisory and shared control system for telerobotics

An interactive user interface, UMI (User-Macro-Interface), and its complete task execution system have been developed and implemented for use by an operator to describe, simulate, and execute tasks on a multiarm telerobot. The operator interactively sets up the execution environment and specifies input parameters for a variety of available task primitives. Several task primitives can be stored together as a task sequence for later sequence execution. The primitives or sequences can be executed on a graphics simulator or on the JPL Telerobot, which includes two task execution manipulators, one manipulator used for positioning cameras, and two six-degree-of-freedom force reflecting hand controllers used for shared and teleoperation modes of execution. In supervisory control, the operator sets up a task primitive or a sequence of primitives and executes the task autonomously. In teleoperation, the user specifies desired initialization parameters and controls the arms with the hand controllers. In shared control, teleoperated inputs from the operator hand controllers are merged during task execution with inputs from user parameterized autonomous primitives. In all modes of operation, UMI allows the operator to stop execution at any time. The UMI interface is intended as the operator interface at a local command site to prepare and send commands to a remote space telerobot.<<ETX>>

Mars pathfinder mission Internet-based operations using WITS

The Web Interface for Telescience (WITS) is an Internet-based tool that the Mars Pathfinder mission used for both mission operations at JPL and public outreach. WITS enables the viewing of downlinked images and results in various ways, terrain feature measurement and annotation, and planning of daily mission activities. WITS is written in the Java language and is accessible by mission scientists and the general public via a web browser. The public can use WITS to plan and simulate their own rover missions. WITS will also be used in the 1998 lander and 2001, 2003, and 2005 rover missions to Mars.

The multifunction automated crawling system (MACS)

A new robotic crawler is being developed for inspection of large aircraft external surfaces. The multifunction automated crawling system (MACS) has been designed and fabricated to carry miniature instrumentation to perform a wide variety of tasks while being attached to an aircrafts surface. The immediate application of MACS is inspection of the exterior of large military aircraft such as the C-5. Various inspection payload modules could be incorporated onto the MACS crawler to perform the desired inspections. MACS employs ultrasonic motors for mobility and suction cups for surface adherence. MACS has two legs for linear motion and a rotation element for turning, enabling any simultaneous combination of motion from linear to rotation about a central axis.

Internet-based operations for the Mars Polar Lander mission

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) mission was the first planetary mission to use Internet-based distributed ground operations where scientists and engineers collaborate in daily mission operations from multiple geographically distributed locations via the Internet. This paper describes the operations system, the Web interface for telescience (WITS), which was used by the MPL mission for Internet-based operations. WITS was used for generating command sequences for the landers robotic arm and robotic arm camera, and as a secondary tool for sequence generation for the stereo camera on the lander. WITS was also used as a public outreach tool. Results are shown from the January 2000 field test in Death Valley, California.

Mobile Manipulation and Mobility as Manipulation-Design and Algorithms of RoboSimian

This article presents the hardware design and software algorithms of RoboSimian, a statically stable quadrupedal robot capable of both dexterous manipulation and versatile mobility in difficult terrain. The robot has generalized limbs and hands capable of mobility and manipulation, along with almost fully hemispherical three-dimensional sensing with passive stereo cameras. The system is semiautonomous, enabling low-bandwidth, high latency control operated from a standard laptop. Because limbs are used for mobility and manipulation, a single unified mobile manipulation planner is used to generate autonomous behaviors, including walking, sitting, climbing, grasping, and manipulating. The remote operator interface is optimized to designate, parametrize, sequence, and preview behaviors, which are then executed by the robot. RoboSimian placed fifth in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials, demonstrating its ability to perform disaster recovery tasks in degraded human environments.

Application of intelligent monitoring for super long distance teleoperation

Time delay and limited communication capacity are the primary constraints in super-long distance telerobotic systems such as space telerobotic systems. Intelligent monitoring is efficient for this problem to provide a function which selects important scenes to help the operator through a monitoring camera. We constructed a telerobotic testbed which includes a connection through the international ISDN and typical space structure (space robot, truss structure land ORU). We conducted trans-Pacific teleoperation experiments using the testbed in ETL as the remote site and a telerobotic console at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California) as a local site. Experimental results showed intelligent monitoring to be effective for the above problems.

A testbed for a unified teleoperated-autonomous dual-arm robotic system

A description is given of a complete robot control facility built at the CIT Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of a NASA telerobotic program to develop a state-of-the-art robot control environment for laboratory-based spacelike experiments. This system has the following features: separation of the computing facilities into local and remote sites, autonomous motion generation in joint or Cartesian coordinates, dual-arm force reflecting teleoperation with voice interaction between the operator and the robots, shared control between the autonomously generated motions and operator controlled teleoperation, and dual-arm coordinated trajectory generation. The system has been used to carry out realistic experiments such as the exchange of an orbital replacement unit, bolt turning, and door opening, using a mixture of autonomous actions and teleoperation, with either a single arm or two cooperating arms.<<ETX>>A description is given of a complete robot control facility built as part of a NASA telerobotics program to develop a state-of-the-art robot control environment for performing experiments in the repair and assembly of spacelike hardware to gain practical knowledge of such work and to improve the associated technology. The basic architecture of the manipulator control subsystem is presented. The multiarm Robot Control C Library, a key software component of the system, is described, along with its implementation on a Sun-4 computer. The systems simulation capability is also described, and the teleoperation and shared control features are explained.<<ETX>>

Multifunction automated crawling system (MACS)

Nondestructive evaluation instruments and sensors are becoming smaller with enhanced computer controlled capability and increasingly use commercially available hardware and software. Further, robotic instruments are being developed to serve as mobility platforms allowing automation of the inspection process. This combination of miniaturized sensing and robotics technology enables hybrid miniature technology solutions for identified aircraft inspection needs. Integration of inspection and robotics technologies is benefited by the use of a standard computing platform. JPL investigated the application of telerobotic technology to inspection of aircraft structures using capabilities that were developed for use in space exploration. A miniature crawler that can travel on the surface of aircraft using suction cups for adherence was developed and is called multifunction automated crawling systems (MACS). MACS is an operational tool that can perform rapid large area inspection of aircraft, which has a relatively large platform to carry miniature inspection instruments payload. The capability of MACS and the trend towards autonomous inspection crawlers will be reviewed and discussed in this paper.

End-to-end dexterous manipulation with deliberate interactive estimation

This paper presents a model based approach to autonomous dexterous manipulation, developed as part of the DARPA Autonomous Robotic Manipulation (ARM) program. The developed autonomy system uses robot, object, and environment models to identify and localize objects, and well as plan and execute required manipulation tasks. Deliberate interaction with objects and the environment increases system knowledge about the combined robot and environmental state, enabling high precision tasks such as key insertion to be performed in a consistent framework. This approach has been demonstrated across a wide range of manipulation tasks, and in independent DARPA testing archived the most successfully completed tasks with the fastest average task execution of any evaluated team.