Towards a formal representation for heterogeneous teams of humans and robots in space exploration

Abstract

Future exploration missions to the Moon and Mars will require humans and robots to work in teams to explore and conduct science on planetary surfaces, and erect, maintain, and repair space-based infrastructure. A unified framework to optimally leverage the capabilities of humans and robots in space exploration, although not yet available, will be an invaluable tool for mission planning. Such a framework requires formal methods to represent human-robotic system architectures, define tasks, formulate common task-based metrics, and evaluate human-robotic system architectures. Our objective is to formulate a method to represent human-robotic system architectures to provide a basis for standard means of evaluating human-robotic systems against a common set of metrics. The representation of a human-robotic system must capture the information necessary to compare different teams of humans and robots performing the same task or set of tasks in terms of common metrics: productivity/effectiveness, cost or resources expended, reliability associated with successfully completing a task or set of tasks, safety of human agents, flexibility and robustness of a team architecture to changing environments and requirements.