Ready when you are!

The Surface Avatar experiment is a collaboration with the German Space Agency (DLR) with three different robots getting ready to go to work at DLR’s German Space Operations Centre (GSOC) in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany: A lander system with a robotic arm that could load and unload samples, a humanoid robot called Rollin’ Justin, and a robot “dog” called Bert. At ESA’S technical heart ESTEC in The Netherlands, a fourth robot is getting ready, a rover with two robotic arms. They will soon all be together in GSOC, ready for the next step in robotic telepresence, where the robots become an extension of the operator.

Andreas will be controlling the group of robots from the International Space Station during his Huginn Mission, to complete a series of complex tasks.

“The details of the tasks are being kept secret as part of the experiment is to see how Andreas commands the robots with little preparation – an extra challenge for the engineers and the astronaut to make the experiment all the more realistic.” said Marco Sewtz, researcher in Perception and Cognition from DLR.