Danish astronaut, Andreas Mogensen, has successfully proved he can remotely operate a robot on Earth while he flies aboard the International Space Station. Mogensen, of the European Space Agency Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory, utilized haptic technology to “feel” the robot 249 miles below him and to place a rounded peg into a hole.
SPECIFICS OF THE EXPERIMENT
The European Space Agency’s Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory developed the experiment in collaboration with the TU Delft Robotics Institute, according to BBC. Andreas Mogensen correctly positioned the small peg into a hole using the Interact Centaur rover’s robot arm and a laser-guided tool. The rover was situated at ESA’s technical center in Noordwijk, Netherlands. The blue-and-white fiberglass robot, which cost less than $224,000 to build, has a camera on its head which allows the controller to directly see the task it is performing.
According to the BBC, video signals and other feedback had to pass through a complex communications network involving ISS mission control, ground antennas, and relay satellites. The wide range of communication signals caused a one second delay, which Mogensen overcame.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR MANKIND
While the minute motion of placing a rounded peg into a hole seems like a small feat, it is major advance that will hopefully lead to human-controlled robots constructing sites on Mars, giving humans a home base to then explore the red planet. “Mars is much too far for direct remote control from Earth, but flying astronauts around the planet would overcome the problem of time delay,” said the European Space Agency last year.
SPACE ROBOT: IMAGINING THE POSSIBILITIES
Professor Frans van der Helm, from Delft University’s mechanical engineering unit, said one possibility of using this type of technology could be to have robots work in a massive nuclear fusion project in France. If the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is built, “the heat will be about one million degrees,” Van der Helm told AFP. This could make it difficult for the robots to perform tasks they have been programmed to complete. This is where the human-to-robot haptic technology could help, by allowing humans to feel their way through and fix problems.
