A wire-handling experiment using a teleoperated advanced robotic hand on ETS-VII

This paper describes the result of the wire handling experiment by the advanced robotic hand (ARH) on ETSVII. The ARH, a small robot system with multi-sensory hand, has been developed by MITI-ETL to execute precise tasks under extra vehicular conditions in space in an ETSVII robot experiment. The wire handling task has been proposed for the ARH experiment as one of such delicate tasks. I t requires teleoperation because wire deformation i s difficult to estimate and needs operator's judgement. A new control system has been developed to cope with the teleoperation under time delay and limited information for wire handling task using the ARH. On July 23, 1998, the experiment was carried out by the teleoperation from Tsukuba Space Center to the ETSVII through the data relay satellite TDRS of NASA. In the experiment, the contact force was controlled within 5 N and the wire handling was done successfully using the ARH under 6 seconds round-trip delay. The validity of our proposed control method was verified.