Invited presentation by Daniel Leidner, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany: The Surface Avatar Experiment: A Glimpse Into the Future of Astronaut-Robot Collaboration for Planetary Infrastructure Maintenance
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Daniel Leidner received his diploma degree in communications engineering in 2010, and his M.Sc. degree in information technology in 2011 with distinction from the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim, Germany. In 2017 he received the Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany. His dissertation was honored with the Georges Giralt PhD Award as well as the Helmholtz Doctoral Prize. He is currently Group Leader on Fault-Tolerant Autonomy Architectures at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Wessling, Germany. As Co-Investigator of the Surface Avatar experiments, he investigates artificial intelligence in the context of astronaut-robot collaboration. |
Surface Avatar is a set of space telerobotics experiments led by DLR, in partnership with ESA. Its aim is twofold: 1. study the feasibility of deploying of a heterogeneous robotic team to perform collaborative tasks on a planetary surface, and 2. examine the use of a multi-modal user interface to allow the human user to teleoperate the robots as intelligent co-workers and haptically coupled avatars. To be carried out between 2022 and 2024, different robots, including a humanoid robot, a rover, a quad-pedal robot, and a robotic lander, will work as a team on the ground. They will be commanded by the crew on board the International Space Station using a computer with a graphical user interface, a joystick, and a 7-degrees-of-freedom force reflection input device. This presentation will give an overview of the developed technology, recent achievements, and the planned experiments.