Experimental Head-Up Display for Space Telerobotics

Space telerobotics take place in a perceptionally highly demanding and unintuitive environment, which is characterized by a distinct lack of natural references regarding position, velocity and orientation. In the fields of aviation and terrestrial telerobotics, the operator is traditionally provided with attitude information in a Head-Up Display (HUD). This paper describes the design and the implementation of a HUD for telepresent on-orbit servicing. The HUD contains information about the spacecraft’s orientation in three coordinate frames, which are relevant for different mission phases. In addition, it also displays velocity information and trajectory predictions for rendezvous & docking maneuvers. This predictive display supports the operator in coping with the unintuitive motion and roundtrip time delay encountered in space telerobotics. The HUD is implemented both for use in the spaceflight simulator Orbiter and as an overlay for stereo video streams. The experiments to be conducted using these setups are outlined.