<title>Space robot commanding and supervision by means by projective virtual reality: the ERA experiences</title>

Abstract

The symbiosis between computer graphics and modern planning and control methodologies is the basis for the development of projective virtual reality based telepresence techniques at the IRF. Virtual world appear close-to-reality for the user because of the interaction modeling technique borrowed from the field of robotic research. These techniques provide an intuitively operable user~environment for a greater range of application.The underlying idea of projective virtual reality is to first let the user work in a virtual world modeled after the physical plant to control and supervice. A projective virtual reality system then automatically deduce the impact of the user”saction on the state of the virtual plant and in turn employs action planning method to generate the equivalent impact on the physical plant using robots or other means of automation.Thus the robots are projecting the user “s action from the virtual into the physical world. The the German /Japanese project GETEX (German ETS-VII Experiment),the IRF realized the telerobotic ground station for the free flying robot ERA on board the japanese satellite ETS-VII. During the mission in April 1999the Virtual Reality based command interface out to be an ideally suited platform for the intuitive commanding and supervision of the robotic in space.