Space Robotics Editorial

摘要

In many respects, the ultimate "field" for robots is space.Creating robots for space is certainly one of our most ambitious engineering goals.Space applications present many challenges to robotic systems: from extremes of temperature, vacuum, shock, radiation, and gravity, to limitations on power, mass, and communication; from the intricate complexity of systems engineering, to requirements for reliability, robustness, and efficiency.Space robotic systems span the range from direct interaction with human astronauts, to high-bandwidth teleoperation from Earth, to total independence in deep space.Humanity started sending vehicles into space with Sputnik-1 in 1957.These earliest vehicles eventually moved from Earth orbit to the surface of the moon.They could not react to what they sensed or control their own motions but they sometimes sent back images of what they encountered.The first Lunakhod vehicles landed on the moon in 1970.They demonstrated operational lives measured in years and mobility of over 40 km total distance on another planet, but they were driven by human teleoperation.The Viking landers reached Mars in 1976.They reached out, collected soil, and ran astrobiology experiments while sending back images for years.The first autonomous rover on another planet was Sojourner in the 1996 Mars Pathfinder mission.It was not capable of venturing out of sight from the lander, but it had a rudimentary ability to detect and avoid obstacles.More recently, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, each have moved many kilometers from their landing sites since landing in 2004.They act autonomously on a daily basis, carefully navigating on their own and delicately placing instruments on target.Over the past 50 years, the essential technologies