Dexterous Whole-Body Manipulation for Robotic Lunar Operations

Autonomous robotic systems will play a critical role in NASArsquo;s efforts to develop and sustain a manned presence in cislunar space, on the lunar surface, and beyond. However, operating these systems through highly asynchronous connections presents significant challenges beyond normal terrestrial or near-earth applications. Moreover, plans to employ robots for mission infrastructure such as habitats or in-situ production of oxygen or propellant, or for expanded science applications in the absence of humans, drastically increases the demands on the movement and manipulation capabilities of the robot. To meet these demands, we must both increase the mobile and dextrous manipulation capabilities of these systems, as well as ensure that human operators have the necessary tools to operate them with confidence. Building on our previous work in fault management and recovery for complex motion planning and execution, we will augment our platform for supervised autonomy to enable execution of complex mobile manipulation tasks with high degrees of operator confidence. We will build a representative hardware system with multiple arms and a mobile base, and integrate it into our software application. Finally, we will assemble behavior trees to demonstrate using supervised autonomy to complete relevant lunar construction, science, or habitat caretaking tasks in a representative ground environment.