Quantitative evaluation of Human-Robot options for maintenance tasks during analogue surface operations

Abstract

Due to the scarcity of human labour plus the harsh conditions at any human Mars base of the foreseeable future, robots are likely to be employed in to assist with at least some assembly, deployment, transportation, inspection, servicing or repair tasks. By the first human landing, robotic technology is expected to have made possible the use of robot teams already on the surface to prepare the landing site, ensure the functioning of ISRU equipment and survey the local area for the arriving astronauts. Robots are also likely to assist them during their stay and after their departure. Today’s researchers are increasingly interested in the question of how to systematically choose the best combination of robots and/or humans for particular tasks, and how to actually demonstrate and measure teams performing these tasks in realistic simulations. This paper critically examines a quantitative method developed by Roderiguez and Weisbin of JPL for computing performance/resource scores for a range of human-machine systems on a variety of tasks. It then proposes a practical experiment, to be conducted at a future Mars Society surface operations simulation, that will apply the method to quantitatively compare human maintenance task scores with those of a hexapodal service robot that the author is currently building.