Developing Principles for Effective Human Collaboration with Free-Flying Robots

NASA missions increasingly depend on the seamless integration of human-robot systems to accomplish critical mission goals. In particular, an emerging class of free-flying robots appears to hold great promise in complementing human space exploration activities. For example, remotely operated or semi-autonomous free-flyers on board the International Space Station (ISS), such as the Astrobee platform, may assist mission endeavors by automating environmental data collection (e.g., ISS housekeeping and in-flight maintenance), serving as a maneuverable remote monitoring platform for ground control, and acting as a robotic telepresence platform. In addition, free-flyers might also support lunar or planetary surface exploration (e.g., as with the Mars Ingenuity platform), working in conjunction with mobile ground robots (“rovers”) and potentially human astronauts as part of a diverse team.
This research focused on building knowledge regarding how such robots may effectively collaborate with users and integrate into human environments, such as the ISS. In exploring how such robots may serve as collaborative partners for human activities in NASA work contexts, our two primary objectives have been developing: (1)new methods for communicating robot status at a glance and (2) scalable robot interface technologies that support both proximal and distal operation.
Over the course of this award, we have advanced the state-of-the-art across both of these objectives while also investigating several additional topics related to human-robot teaming, including developing new computational models for robots interacting with groups of humans, exploring robots that can change shape to enhance safety and/or communicate with users, and investigating how robots may recover from failures. This award has led to 10 full conference publications, of which 2 won Best Papers and another won a Best Paper Nominee, 2 journal publications, and 7 workshop papers, posters, and other presentations. We provide more details on the various aspects of these research contributions in the next sections.