Autonomous Cobots to Enhance Situational Awareness

Robotic technologies are expected to support the Artemis missions in numerous ways, from lander site preparation to various construction and lander logistic tasks in orbit and on the lunar surface. Controlling these remote assets effectively confronts a longstanding problem in robotics. Teleoperatingthese robots remotely induces a high cognitive load on robot operators because they must manage 6 degrees of freedom in the mobile base, up to 7 degrees of freedom in the robotic arm, and additional degrees of freedom in the end-effector.To compound the issue, remote assets generally have myopic sensor feedback that does not provide sufficient information alone to maintain situational awareness for effective operations. As such, operators must also controlany additional sensor apparatus or robots used to maintain situational awareness. Situational awareness has a large impact on mission outcome-salient information fused and appropriately displayed to a remote operator has shown to result in higher mission success. However, reconfiguring a multi-agent system to increase situational awareness will further burden crew workload as operators will need to manually allocate and position additional resources to obtain requisite views. To address this issue, TRACLabs has invented a framework called ACES (Autonomous Cobots to Enhance Situational Awareness) to enhance perceptual feedback and decrease the cognitive load on remote robot operators by building upon ideas from active perception, sliding autonomy and task-level commanding. The resulting system autonomously positions additional robots or sensor systems not currently engaged in a task to obtain additional meaningful percepts to enhance operator situational awareness, thus increasing the likelihood of successful task completion while reducing cognitive load on crew. Robots are expected to support the Artemis missions in numerous ways, from lander site preparation to various construction and lander logistic tasks in orbit and on the lunar surface. These remote assets generally have myopic sensor feedback that does not provide sufficient information alone to maintain situational awareness (SA) for effective operations. SA has a large impact on mission outcome-salient information fused and appropriately displayed to a remote operator has been shown to result in higher mission success. Currently, operators must control any additional apparatus or robots used to maintain SA, increasing their cognitive load.  Building upon ideas from active perception, sliding autonomy and task-level commanding, TRACLabs has invented a framework called ACES (Autonomous Cobots to Enhance Situational Awareness) to address this issue. ACES autonomously positions additional robots or sensor systems to obtain task-relevant views to enhance operator SA, thus increasing the likelihood of successful task completion while reducing cognitive load on crew. Our objectives for Phase II focus on designing and prototyping the ACES system. Building upon the Phase I proof-of-concept system, we will investigate how ACES can be leveraged to coordinate and control heterogeneous multi-agent teams to increase remote operator performance. Specifically, our technical objectives are: Relaxing Mobile Assumption-allow ACES to control static systems (such as non-mobile arms or sensor systems); Additional Metrics and Satisfying Multiple Objectives-investigate additional measures to rank and select what is displayed to operators; Incorporating Environmental Occluders-plan with environmental line-of-sight constraints; Resource Allocation-effectively allocate free resources from a pool of multi-agent assets; Demonstrations of Prototype ACES System-in simulation and on hardware in NASA relevant domains. Deliverables include: a kickoff meeting within 30 days of contract start; quarterly progress reports; a comprehensive final report; software implementations; and a prototype demonstration of ACES system in NASA relevant simulated OSAM settings and a hardware demonstration on NASA equipment if available.

Multiple near-term and future NASA missions and projects could benefit from the advances we expect to see over the lifetime of this project, including: LANDO – NASA ECI project starting 10/1/2021 MMPACT – Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technology PASS – Persistent Assembled Space Structures LSMS – Ongoing effort to further develop and demonstrate the LSMS (Lunar Surface Manipulation System) OSAM – On-orbit Service Assembly and Manufacturing efforts iSAT – in-Space Assembled Telescope Artemis OSAM efforts of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Space Vehicles (RV) division; DARPA RSGS; Commercial Space Companies; Inspection/verification for remote facilities for Energy, Automotive, and Chemical Manufacturing sectors 

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