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Completed TRL 3 (started at 2, targeting 3)
The Fast Affordance Manipulation Execution (FAME) project aims to improve dexterous robot manipulation by providing a sparse, concise, and expressive representation of object affordances that can achieve multiple concurrent objectives and be executed quickly, reactively, and safely alongside humans on-board spacecraft. To achieve this, sparse and robot-generic affordance templates will be extended with computationally quick and expressive potential field controllers to represent affordance templates. Quick computation of potential field controllers and dynamic combination of control commands through nullspace projection will make affordances quick to execute. This representation also supports multi-objective and reactive behaviors, which are crucial for dexterous manipulation in dynamic environments, especially when robots are expected to work safely alongside humans on-board spacecraft. FAME will address many open questions in dexterous manipulation---specifically real-time computation, reactive and multi-objective behaviors---while emphasizing safety for operation in space technology applications such as the International Space Station or spacewalks.
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