Placing a round metal peg in a round hole in a task board is a challenging task for a young child, but tends to be rather easy for adults – unless you do what ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen did and raise the degree of difficulty by using a remote-controlled rover in space.
As Engadget explained on Wednesday, Mogensen was able to control a ground-based rover 248 miles away while on board the International Space Station (ISS) using an ESA-developed force-feedback joystick. The device allowed him to feel when the robot encountered resistance on the ground and gave him enhanced ability to control its limbs.
Using this haptic feedback enabled him to complete an experiment in which he used the rover to place the peg into a task board hole offering less than one-sixth of a millimeter of clearance. The peg had to be inserted four centimeters to complete an electrical connection, the agency said, and while the task took 45 minutes on the first try, Mogensen needed just 10 on his second.
First-ever use of force-feedback robotics from orbit
André Schiele of the ESA’s Telerobotics and Haptics Laboratory led the experiment, and in a statement, he said that the organization was “happy” with the results of the trial. The trial took place Tuesday at the ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands and was observed by a group of telerobotics engineers, center personnel, and the media.
“Andreas managed two complete drive, approach, park and peg-in-hole insertions, demonstrating precision force-feedback from orbit for the very first time in the history of spaceflight,” Schiele said. “He had never operated the rover before but its controls turned out to be very intuitive.”
Mogensen used the force-feedback joystick to control the Interact Centaur rover, which was designed and built by members of the Telerobotics and Haptics Lab along with graduate students from the Delft University of Technology. The 4×4-wheeled rover has a camera head, a pair of arms used for remote force-feedback operation, and an array of proximity and location sensors.
“The Interact experiment is a first step towards developing robots that provide their operators with much wider sensory input than currently available,” the ESA said in a statement. “In future, similar systems could be used for ground-based operators to oversee dexterous robotic tasks in orbit – such as removing debris around Earth – or even to build a base on the Moon.”
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Feature Image: ESA
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