Pointing device for an astronaut robot team on a planetary exploration mission

Abstract

This thesis discusses the need of human robot interface implementations specialized on the usage for astronaut robot collaboration during an extravehicular activity on a planetary mission. As astronauts will always wear their space suit outside the vehicles the idea is to implement sensors on the space suit which are used by the robot. The thesis proposes a simple pointing device using an IMU on the astronaut's arm for giving arbitrary locations to the robotic assistant in order to be able to command it to not previously known positions. Experiments simulating typical extravehicular activities show that the proposed setup can work, but that the IMU might not be the best sensor for this interface because of the constantly drifting yaw angle. Comparing the implemented pointing device to other setups using for example arm joint angle measurements or head and eye tracking could reveal which one is best suited for pointing.