Haptic Driving at ESA/ESTEC

Teleoperation
Challenge

These scenarios frequently lead to a high mental workload, erroneous perceptions of the environment, and faulty decision-making.

 

Teleoperating rovers in unstructured environments (e.g., Lunar or Martian surface) is often challenging for the human operator.

Credits: HRI-Lab, ESA/ESTEC
Our Approach

Implement steering functionalities with a 7DoF device

Integrate proprioceptive cues for attitude awareness

Project Partners

Haptic Driving

Description

This project implemented a novel haptic teleoperation interface to improve the interaction with remotely operated rovers in the domain of planetary exploration. With this approach, the operator can control both the robotic arm and the rover’s locomotion with a 7-DoF force feedback device (sigma.7) depending on the operation mode (manipulation or locomotion).

Moreover, while standard haptic devices for teleoperation only display one type of stimuli (e.g., contact forces), the implemented interface displays three distinct haptic stimuli:

  1. Force (during manipulation tasks, e.g., rock-picking),
  2. Proprioceptive (emulate the inclination of the rover while traversing rough terrains)
  3. Vibration convey traction losses during locomotion.
This work was developed in collaboration with the HRI-Lab, at ESA/ESTEC, The Netherlands.

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal), through PhD Grant PD/BD/150634/2020, FCT Projects UIDB/50009/2020, UIDB/04466/2020 and UIDP/04466/2020, “Aero.Next Portugal” project, and was part of the ESA TDE (Technology Development Element) 4000136200/0/0/0 WP2021.

Read more

Rute Luz, Aaron Pereira, Jéssica Corujeira, Thomas Krueger, Jacob Beck, Emiel den Exter, Thibaud Chupin, José Luís Silva, and Rodrigo Ventura, “Feeling the Slope? Teleoperation of a mobile robot using a 7DOF haptic device with attitude feedback”, 2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Busan, Korea, Republic of, 2023, pp. 392-398, doi: 10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309330.

Rute Luz, Thomas Krueger, Aaron Pereira, Emiel Den Exter, Jacob Beck, Thibaud Chupin, José Luís Silva, and Rodrigo Ventura. “Multimodal operations for rover teleoperation: Haptic driving and manipulation with a 7-DOF device”, in 17th Symposium on Advanced Space Technologies in Robotics and Automation (ASTRA), October 2023

Rute Luz, Aaron Pereira, Edmundo Ferreira, Thomas Krueger, Jessica Corujeira, Jose Luis Silva, and Rodrigo Ventura. “Enhanced haptic interface for rover teleoperation”. In Symposium on Advanced Space Technologies in Robotics and Automation (ASTRA). ESA ESTEC, 2022