The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Robotics Operations branch at the Johnson Space Center is entrusted with the planning and execution of operations on-board the International Space Station (ISS) using the Canadarm2, Dextre, and Mobile Transporter robots. While the most exciting part of the team’s work (the aspect most often shown on television or portrayed in movies) is the actual execution of the mission, a significantly greater portion of a robotics flight controller’s time is spent performing pre-operations planning. Myriad aspects of each robotic task must be considered in detail prior to execution, including overall task choreography, robot configurations and trajectories, writing of operational procedures, incorporation of protections against operational risks, adherence to flight rules, and advance development of contingency response plans. Recognizing the time demands associated with executing pre-operations planning and struggling to meet increasing call for extra-vehicular robotics operations on-board the ISS, NASA’s Robotics Operations branch sought to automate their pre-operations planning process with the goal of decreasing process execution time while preserving (or ideally, improving) the process’ level of safety and mission success. To achieve this objective the team employed an agile software development model and prioritized software features that would reduce the process’ inherent human risk by allowing the software to autonomously execute those tasks most often performed incorrectly by human operators. This chapter provides an overview of the Robotics Operations branch’s pre-operations planning process followed by a description of the automation project and associated software mechanisms and algorithms. Also discussed are several challenges that were addressed during the software development and adoption phases and the results of the effort.


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    Title :

    Automating International Space Station Robotics Operations Planning: Successes and Challenges


    Additional title:

    Springer Aerospace Techn.



    Published in:

    Space Operations ; Chapter : 26 ; 577-599


    Publication date :

    2022-03-16


    Size :

    23 pages





    Type of media :

    Article/Chapter (Book)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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