TAR: A Twin Arm Robot for Dexterous Assembly and Maintenance Tasks on ISS

By mid 2002 crew time will become a precious resource on ISS. Especially EVA activities will be under pressure, requiring special training, preparation and post-sortie recovery. The key issue is a collection of human scale dexterous manipulation tasks, like handling MLI and connectors. A significant portion of these tasks is well-predictable and can be considered routine operations. But they are beyond the capabilities of the current ISS robots. This paper describes a concept for a small, dexterous and relatively autonomous two armed robot TAR, that can support the crew in routine assembly and maintenance tasks. Early prototyping activities are showing that there are no major technical obstacles. The main challenges are to come up with an affordable flight development schedule and to obtain political and financial commitments.