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In planning for future exploration missions, architecture and study teams have made numerous assumptions about how crew can be telepresent on a planetary surface by remotely operating surface robots from space (i.e. from a flight vehicle or deep space habitat). These assumptions include estimates of technology maturity, existing technology gaps, and operational risks. These assumptions, however, have not been grounded by experimental data. Moreover, to date, no crew-controlled surface telerobot has been fully tested in a high-fidelity manner. To address these issues, we developed the "Surface Telerobotics" tests to do three things: 1) Demonstrate interactive crew control of a mobile surface telerobot in the presence of short communications delay. 2) Characterize a concept of operations for a single astronaut remotely operating a planetary rover with limited support from ground control. 3) Characterize system utilization and operator work-load for a single astronaut remotely operating a planetary rover with limited support from ground control.

Under the Urban Environment Exploration project, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Paci c (SSC-PAC) is maturing technologies and sensor payloads that enable man-portable robots to operate autonomouslywithin the challenging conditions of urban environments. Previously, SSC-PAC has demonstrated robotic capa-bilities to navigate and localize without GPS and map the ground oors of various building sizes. 1 SSC-PAC hassince extended those capabilities to localize and map multiple multi-story buildings within a speci ed area. Tofacilitate these capabilities, SSC-PAC developed technologies that enable the robot to detect stairs/stairwells,maintain localization across multiple environments (e.g. in a 3D world, on stairs, with/without GPS), visualizedata in 3D, plan paths between any two points within the speci ed area, and avoid 3D obstacles. These tech-nologies have been developed as independent behaviors under the Autonomous Capabilities Suite, a behaviorarchitecture, and demonstrated at a MOUT site at Camp Pendleton. This paper describes the perceptions andbehaviors used to produce these capabilities, as well as an example demonstration scenario.Keywords: robotics, urban environment, exploration, mapping, localization, autonomy, lidar, SLAM

Robotic rovers can be used as advance scouts to signifi cantly improve scientifi c and technical return of planetary surface exploration. Robotic scouting, or “robotic recon,” involves using a robot to collect ground-level data prior to human fi eld activity. The data collected and knowledge acquired through recon can be used to refi ne traverse planning, reduce operational risk, and increase crew productivity. To understand how robotic recon can benefi t human exploration, we conducted a series of simulated planetary robotic missions at analog sites. These mission simulations were designed to: (1) identify and quantify operational requirements for robotic recon in advance of human activity; (2) identify and quantify ground control and science team requirements for robotic recon; and (3) identify capability, procedure, and training requirements for human explorers to draw maximum benefi t from robotic recon during vehicular traverses and on-foot extravehicular activities (EVA). Our studies indicate that robotic recon can be benefi cial to crew, improving preparation, situational awareness, and productivity in the fi eld. This is particularly true when traverse plans contain signifi cant unknowns that can be resolved by recon, such as target access and station/activity priority. In this paper, we fi rst present the assumptions and major questions related to robotic reconnaissance. We detail our system design, including the confi guration of our recon robot, the ground data system used for operation, ground control organization, and operational time lines. Finally, we describe the design and results from an experiment to assess robotic recon, discuss lessons learned, and identify directions for future work.

By 2020, NASA plans to return to the Moon with a new series of regularly spaced surface missions. Crewed missions will initially be "extended sortie" (e.g., 1-2 weeks). During the first few years of the lunar campaign, humans will be on the Moon less than 10% of the time. During the 90% of time between crew visits, robots could perform tasks under ground control. This paper presents the system design for a prototype robotic recon robot and ground control approach, as well as a terrestrial analog field test designed to assess the utility of recon for augmenting and assisting human exploration of a lunar-like environment. Results are presented for recent field testing of the reconnaissance robot in northern Arizona.

To ensure that robots are used effectively for exploration missions, it is important to assess their performance during operations. We are investigating the definition and computation of performance metrics for assessing remote robotic operations in real-time. Our approach is to monitor data streams from robots, compute performance metrics, and provide Web-based displays of these metrics for assessing robot performance during operations. We evaluated our approach for measuring robot performance with the K10 rovers from NASA Ames Research Center during a field test at Moses Lake Sand Dunes (WA) in June 2008. In this paper we present the results of evaluating our software for robot performance and discuss our conclusions from this evaluation for future robot operations.

Since 2004, NASA has been working to return to the Moon. In contrast to the Apollo missions, two key objectives of the current exploration program is to establish significant infrastructure and an outpost. Achieving these objectives will enable long-duration stays and long-distance exploration of the Moon. To do this, robotic systems will be needed to perform tasks which cannot, or should not, be performed by crew alone. In this paper, we summarize our work to develop "utility robots" for lunar surface operations, present results and lessons learned from field testing, and discuss directions for future research.