The Robotics Institute

RI | Seminar | September 30

Robotics Institute Seminar, September 30
Time and Place | Seminar Abstract | Speaker Biography | Speaker Appointments


Human Telesupervision of Multirobot Teams for Space Exploration

 

John Dolan

Senior Systems Scientist

Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon University

 

 

Webcast

 

View the seminar.

 

Time and Place

Mauldin Auditorium (NSH 1305)
Refreshments
3:15 pm
Talk
3:30 pm

Abstract

 

Space exploration is one of the costliest, riskiest, and most fatiguing activities human beings pursue. On-orbit and lunar experiences show that after about five hours of work in a spacesuit, astronauts must return to their base habitat, exhausted by the intensive effort required. Robots, on the other hand, with their resilience to the harsh space environment and autonomous capabilities, have proven to work well in extraterrestrial environments, and should be used to augment human capabilities. In response to President Bush's January 2004 Vision for Human and Robotic Space Exploration, a fleet of space robots would ideally be able to explore vast regions, prospect for minerals and other valuable resources, and perform science and other operations as autonomously as possible, but also provide a human telesupervisor the means to easily plan and monitor their tasks and intervene as necessary or appropriate from the safety of a "shirtsleeve" environment.

 

In this talk, I discuss current work addressing several of the components needed to create such a system. I will present the results attained so far in the areas of the robot supervision architecture; hazard and assistance detection; telepresence and teleoperation; robot reliability; as well as results specific to our first system instantiation aimed at wide-area prospecting, including system performance metrics and intelligent sampling techniques.

 

Speaker Biography

John Dolan is a Senior Systems Scientist at The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His interests are in multirobot cooperation, human-machine interaction, sensor networks, and automated manufacturing. His other work at CMU has included the creation of a team of stationary and mobile sentries (CyberScout), the development of a prototype robotic surgical microscope, the control of a gravity compensation system for a flexible truss-walking manipulator, SM2 (Self-Mobile Space Manipulator), and formulation of the kinematics and control of filament winding for non-axisymmetric parts. He attended the Technical University of Munich on a Fulbright Scholarship and has worked for the German Space Agency (DLR). Dr. Dolan received the B.S.E. degree from Princeton University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, all in Mechanical Engineering.

Speaker Appointments

For appointments, please contact Eleanor Cambridge.


The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.