How to plug-in your rover into a space mission to moon or mars

Abstract

The European Space Agency, ESA, has been working on specifying a set of standardised Telerobotics service interfaces in the context of the METERON project. These Services facilitate integration of new robotic agents into the generic infrastructure of future human-robotic space missions. The METERON Robotic Services have been successfully used for the first time as part of the METERON OPSCOM-2 experiment, during which an ESA astronaut monitored and controlled from the International Space Station (ISS) a car-size rover on the ground via the Delay Tolerant Network (DTN), while the same service interfaces were used on the ground via a different communication protocol to perform distributed monitoring of the activities. At multi-agency level, the Telerobotics working group of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) has similar objective of specifying a set of generalised service interfaces, which shall allow interoperability of robotic agents. The specified METERON Robotic Services constitute an input to this standardisation effort. Our paper elaborates on the concept behind abstracting from the proprietary interfaces of diverse robotic agents and explains the adopted approach for the implementation of the fist set of METERON Robotic Services in a communication and technology independent manner.