Rover test opening ceremony and speakers

After visiting the Mission Operations Center, the NASA Social group  piled into two vans and traveled a couple of blocks to the roverscape on the western side of the research center. Six speakers introduced the objectives of the mission, what NASA Ames does, and why telerobotics is important to future missions. Here are videos of each and what each speaker talked about.

Lewis Braxton, Deputy Center Director at NASA Ames Research Center

Ames is one of nine field centers within the agency. We are about to demonstrate how we can communicate with astronauts from the space station flying a few hundred miles above and with a robot on Earth. It will demonstrate how Ames has perfected telerobotics. We are really excited about that because the challenges we have within the agency as far as going places far in distance from planet Earth is that the environments are not very hospitable for us. In order for us to get into those environments, we have to do some precursor things and telerobotics will give us the opportunity to do those things. The demonstration today will show an astronaut on the space station operating a robot at Ames and deploying an antenna to show how things can work from a distance.

Braxton is excited about this because of the societal benefits down the line. Just a few months ago, Braxton was at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View and observed robots traveling though the halls distributing goods and services for the nurses. Imagine the physicians having the ability to telerobotic activities with a robot and be able to perform an examination on a human being. Those are the things we have to do if we are going to deep distant inhospitable environments. This is just a sample demonstration of what can benefit us on Earth as well as us in the universe.

NASA Ames is more than telerobotics. Ames works with high-end computing, autonomous systems, air traffic management, and many more areas of research. Ames is making a big difference, not just in the United States, but around the world.

James Reuther, Deputy Associate Administrator for Programs for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C

The Space Technology Mission Directorate is less than 5% of NASA’s total budget. Human exploration, Mission Directorate, and Science are the big pieces. But we are about getting technologies together for the next generation of missions like sending humans to Mars.

This is a great example of the types of things that we’re doing. For example, imagine that you are an astronaut either on the ground of Mars, or in orbit above Mars, and you wanted to be able to do some logistics like setting up an antenna so that you could communicate back to Earth. You may ask why you couldn’t do that from Earth and telerobotic the Mars rover from Earth.

The problem is that it takes eight minutes for a signal from Earth to reach Mars. If you wanted to have an interactive display, say like when playing a video game, you would have to wait eight minutes for that move to be performed on Mars, and then wait another eight minutes to get confirmation showing that it has actually been executed.

We have to have things like this operate in locale at Mars to be able to do a mission like this. There are many technologies that we invest in in the Mission Technology Directorate. It is advancing the cause so the next generation of missions will be able to execute them and not just rely on having everything be done by a person going out, getting into an astronaut suit, and onto the surface, just to set up an antenna. To the greatest extent possible, we want robots to work in conjunction with people in order to make those missions happen.

Everything that the Mission Technology Directorate does looks towards cross cutting capabilities. It is not just for an application such as a Mars mission. It is also for allowing these same technologies to get infused into everyday work on the planet, medical research, and other applications. The same technologies demonstrated during the rover test would have been fantastic to have at the Fukushima Nuclear disaster where you would want to telerobotically operate a robot that goes into the disaster area. We haven’t got to the point where we could do that regularly and easily today. Robots have to be advanced and the technologies that operate those robots have to be advanced.

Harry Partridge, Chief Technologist at NASA Ames Research Center

Terry Fong, Human Exploration Telerobotics Project Manager and Director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames Research Center

The telerobotics program is part of the Space Technology Mission Directorate and our goal overall is to understand how humans and robots can work well together. Not just any kinds of robots, but remotely operated robots. In particular, we want to understand how we can use these robots to improve the way humans live and work in space. Some of the work on space station include the Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot, developed by the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. They also have a free-flying robot called SPHERES that is managed from NASA Ames.

The K10 robot is part of a system called Surface Telerobotics. It is different from the Mars Rover Program, a very successful program over the past decade to explore the surface of Mars. One of the difficulties with that approach is that the rovers on Mars do all the exploration by themselves. That means they have to drive by themselves figure out how to get from point to point. It is a very slow process. It also takes a large ground control team. Almost ten years ago, they had more than 200 people on the ground planning and operating a rover.

Today, it is quite the opposite. There is a single operator, Astronaut Luca Parmitano on the International Space Station, controlling the robot by himself. There is a support team in a building next to the roverscape. They are there to monitor the systems here on Earth and take care of logistics. Parmitano is 100% in control of the robot.

NASA has written software that is on board the space station that is running on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop computer. The software is written in Java. It is designed to run on any platform. On the space station, they run Windows XP Service Pack 3. They added on new software that allows them to do things that they couldn’t even have conceived of ten years ago.

Another thing they want to know is how to communicate data from space station to the rover using a detailed messaging system developed by NASA.

The testing being done today has two purposes. The first objective is to understand Surface Telerobotics. How does the system work? What are the characteristics? What are the requirements if we are going to use this in future missions? The testing involves capturing lots of information that includes data about the robot, data about the communications, and talking with Parmitano and assessing his workload and his situational awareness and how it changes over time.

The second objective is to simulate a future possible mission. To do that, they have chosen a mission scenario that involves taking a robot to the far side of the moon and deploying a radio telescope to observe the early history the universe, the so called “Cosmic Dawn.” This mission concept was developed by the University of Colorado at Boulder, which is lead by Dr. Jack Burns. This test will help us understand how we would carry out this mission.

To me, one of the most important things about all of this work is that the technology that we develop and test in space and from space is stuff that we can take and transition into everyday life. Fong believes, not just because he is a robot geek at heart, is that we will see more and more robots in our future and everyday lives. If we have the ability to use robots, controlled from space to do work on Earth, why can’t we have robots do work for us at far distances. Why can’t I live in Hawaii and work here in California? To have the ability for humans to project our influence and have capabilities that are conveyed through these avatar-like robots. Robots that can work at a distance. It is going to be something that goes from science fiction to being reality.

Jack Burns, Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Director of the Lunar University network for Astrophysics Research

This morning you’re getting a glimpse into the future of Space Exploration. During the Apollo era that ended 40 years ago, there were single astronauts on the moon and that was the last time we have explored an extraterrestrial body. They had teams of astronauts collecting samples, but it was a single astronaut operation.

The future is going to be an astronaut, or a series of astronauts in control of a fleet of rovers, either from the surface or from orbit. The interface between humans and robots is going to be much more powerful and effective in terms of how we can explore and gather scientifically important information. Whether they are samples from the far side of the moon, or samples that might have life associated with them on Mars, or even in the future going to places like Titan in Europa and doing telerobotic operations. Or like today, placing the first low frequency telescope on the far side of the moon using telerobotic deployment.

Why is that interesting? First, we have never been on the far side of the moon. Secondly, it is the only place in the inner solar system that is radio quiet. The kind of frequencies that we are looking at from the early universe are 100 mHz and below. That starts off right in the middle of the FM band. The other thing is the ionosphere above our heads deflects low radio frequencies. The far side of the moon is a location that is free from those effects.

What we will be able to do at those low frequencies is to probe for the first time when the first stars and first galaxies formed. We can’t do that with the Hubble telescope and can’t do that with the James Webb telescope. It requires operations at very low radio frequencies where we can probe the gas around the stars in the galaxy.

David Mittman, Senior Robotics Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Human Exploration Telerobotics Technical Lead for Robot Data Communications

What I want to talk about is something that is visible. Software is both what you see on the screen and what is making everything work behind the scenes. There are many partnerships including between the hardware and software teams, across NASA involving several NASA centers to put this system into operation, and between the astronauts and robots. The vision that NASA has in exploring the universe, beyond low-Earth orbit, is the kind of activity that will take place not with humans or robots alone, but in a partnership together.

Partnership is a theme that runs through much of what we do. With software, we are using a lot of commercial technology and laptops that can be purchased by anyone and programming languages that can be learned by anyone. We look to a future that is using a lot more of this commercial technology that is less expensive to develop and that leverages the technology development that is taking place in the commercial sector. Making the commercial sector a partner in bringing some of those technologies to space exploration.

I lead a task at JPL called RAPID. It is a robot communication language. Think of it like Skynet without all the nasty side effects. It is a standard that humans and robots can use to intercommunicate, not just with people who develop the robot and the robot itself, but between many teams and many robots, and between many robots. Because robots help us explore, they can help astronauts prepare venues on the surface of the planet, on the moon, or in space before the human arrives. They can help humans during their activities in space and clean up and maintain equipment after the humans have moved on.

We want to have an environment where there are multiple robots helping our humans in space and make these robots easier to operate than would be possible if we had different ways of using the robots.

The RAPID software is one way that we can make the training a little bit easier and have all the robots have a similar communication scheme. Instead of having multiple robots each with unique personalities, to allow an astronaut to use a team of robots that can be reasonably expected to work together.

The telerobotics project is contributing to the definition of this standard within NASA, but is also working to define international standards in telerobotics. It is a fairly expensive endeavor to explore beyond low-Earth orbit. No one space agency is going to be able to take a human to Mars or an asteroid by itself. We are going to have to build these partnerships with other agencies around the world. By developing these international standards of robotic operations, we are crossing the remaining technical boundaries for international collaboration, which is for all these robots to talk to each other.