Ground verification of the feasibility of telepresent on-orbit servicing

In an ideal case telepresence achieves a state, where a human operator can no longer di erentiate between an interaction with a real environment or a technical mediated one. This state is called transparent telepresence. The applicability of telepresence to on-orbit servicing (OOS), i.e. an unmanned servicing operation in space, teleoperated from ground in real time, is veri ed in this paper. For that purpose, a communication test environment was set up on ground, which involved the Institute of Astronautics (LRT) ground station in Garching, Germany and the ESA ground station in Redu, Belgium. Both were connected via the geostationary ESA data relay satellite ARTEMIS. Utilizing the data relay satellite, a teleoperation was accomplished, in which the human operator as well as the (space) teleoperator was located on ground. The feasibility of telepresent OOS was evaluated, using an OOS test bed in the Institute of Mechatronics and Robotics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The manipulation task was representative for OOS and supported real time feedback from the haptic-visual workspace. The tests showed that complex manipulation tasks can be ful lled by utilizing geostationary data relay satellites. For verifying the feasibility of telepresent OOS, di erent evaluation methods were used. The properties of the space link were measured and related to subjective perceptions of participants, which had to ful ll manipulation tasks. An evaluation of the transparency of the system, including the data relay satellite, was accomplished as well.