SBIR-STTR Award

NASA envisions OSAM solutions that involve heterogeneous teams of coordinated service robots. It will be infeasible to effectively coordinate such teams using existing teleoperation techniques. To alleviate this issue, TRACLabs is proposing a framework to enhance perceptual feedback and decrease the cognitive load on operators by building upon ideas from active perception, sliding autonomy and task-level commanding. The resulting system, which we call ACES (Autonomous Cobots to Enhance Situational Awareness), will autonomously position additional robots or sensor systems not currently engaged in a task to autonomously obtain additional meaningful percepts to enhance situational awareness, thus increasing the likelihood of successful task completion. Potential NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words): Multi-agent systems will play a vital role in future exploration, construction, assembly, and maintenance tasks. To support the control an automation of these systems tools to enhance situational awareness will be needed. The proposed effort will help address these needs in several NASA efforts including: ISS robots like Astrobee, R2, and SSRMS, Lunar Gateway, Artemis, OSAM missions (OSAM-1, OSAM-2), NASA in-Space Assembled Telescope (iSAT), and Orbital Debris Mitigation. Potential Non-NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words): Several Non-NASA applications of the proposed work exist, including projects at Space Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) and the AFRL Resilient Autonomous Navigation Guidance and Robotic Systems (RANGRS) program. Additionally, the DARPA Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program is also likely interested in the proposed effort to increase operator situational awareness. Duration: 6

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. Teleoperating these 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 control any 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. Potential NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words): 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 Potential Non-NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words): 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 Duration: 24