Gianfranco Visentin

• Head at European Space Agency

Since the birth of modern robotics concept as an academic discipline as defined by Isaac Asimov in the 1940s, robotics has made significant advancement. In contrast to mostly mechanical automated systems represented by the eighteenth century Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player shown in Fig. 2.1 as an example, modern robotics is still evolving...

Writing a dedicated book on an exciting topic such as space robotics requires a lot of effort and thinking to capture the fundamental knowledge of the topic that has been published to dater and also understand and follow the latest developments of the topic and its rapid advancement in space robotics in this case. After several years of effort in a...

StarTiger is a new approach launched by ESA for conducting research and development. It stands for 'Space Technology Advancements by Resourceful, Targeted and Innovative Groups of Expert Researchers'. The concept involves a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers from several institutions and grants them priority access to facilities for...

Robotic spacecraft enable exploration of our Solar System beyond our human presence. Although spacecraft have explored every planet in the Solar System, the frontiers of space robotics are at the cutting edge of landers, rovers, and now atmospheric explorers, where robotic spacecraft must interact intimately with their environment to explore beyond...

The CISRU project has focused on the development of a software suite for planetary (and terrestrial) robotics, fully abstracted from the robotic platform and enabling interaction between rovers and astronauts in complex tasks and nonstructured scenarios. To achieve this, a high level of autonomy is required, powered by AI and multi-agent autonomous...

Space exploration and establishing human presence on other planets demand advanced technology and effective collaboration between robots and astronauts. Efficient space resource utilization is also vital for extraterrestrial settlements. The Collaborative In-Situ Resources Utilisation (CISRU) project has developed a software suite comprising five k...

Robotics is vital to the continued development toward Lunar and Martian exploration, in-situ resource utilization, and surface infrastructure construction. Large-scale extra-terrestrial missions will require teams of robots with different, complementary capabilities, together with a powerful, intuitive user interface for effective commanding. We in...

Deep space exploration missions have received a lot of attention in the world, such as the moon, Mars, asteroids for scientific observation and human activities. Recently, not only space agencies but also industries or universities have earnestly studied and developed lunar or planetary robots for lunar or planetary exploration. International coope...

The current space debris environment poses a safety hazard to operational space assets as well as a hazard to public safety and property in cases of uncontrolled re-entry events. The accidental 2009 satellite collision between Iridium-33 and Cosmos-2251 led to a debris cloud with up to 823 new large debris objects catalogued and many others not cat...

The limits of space travel are continuously evolving, and this creates increasingly extreme challenges for the crew’s health that must be addressed by the scientific community. Long-term exposure to micro-gravity, during orbital flights, contributes to muscle strength degradation and increases bone density loss. In recent years, several exercise de...

The design of a model-based Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) strategy based on Virtual Actuators (VA) in a built-in Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) setup is addressed for the e.Deorbit space mission. This mission, initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA), aims at removing a large defunct satellite from Earth orbit: ENVISAT. The goal of this...

In this paper, we present a smart, standalone, multi-platform stereo vision/IMU-based navigation system, providing ego-motion estimation. The real-time visual odometry algorithm is run on a nano ITX single-board computer (SBC) of 1.9 GHz CPU and 16-core GPU. High-resolution stereo images of 1.2 megapixel provide high-quality data. Tracking of up to...

Surface sampling on small celestial bodies like moons, asteroids or comets requires sophisticated sampling technology, that will be reliable and safe for the lander stability. On the other hand sample volume demands increases, especially in the perspective of future exploitation of Moon or asteroids. To face such requirements the novel sampling too...

The ESA (European Space Agency) is currently pursuing the development of the e.Deorbit mission that will remove a large defunct satellite from Earth orbit: ENVISAT. To fulfil the mission autonomy requirements, ESA has decided to embed in the GNC (Guidance, Navigation, Control) software, fault tolerance capacities against actuator faults. The aim of...

Extending life or repairing damaged on-orbit assets is not only a very attractive economic option for satellite operators as it could potentially increase margins for commercial services or increasing delivered value of scientific missions, but it would also help reducing the number of debris objects in space. These types of servicing missions pose...

This paper describes a dataset collected along a 1 km section of beach near Katwijk, The Netherlands, which was populated with a collection of artificial rocks of varying sizes to emulate known rock size densities at current and potential Mars landing sites. First, a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle collected georeferenced images of the entire ar...

In the context of robotic space exploration the problem of autonomous global or absolute localization remains unsolved. Current rovers require human in the loop approaches to acquire global positioning. In this paper we assess this problem by refining our previous work in a way that advances the performance of the system while making the procedure...

The second ExoMars mission will be launched in 2020 to target an ancient location interpreted to have strong potential for past habitability and for preserving physical and chemical biosignatures (as well as abiotic/prebiotic organics). The mission will deliver a lander with instruments for atmospheric and geophysical investigations and a rover tas...

In spite of the good performance of space exploratory missions, open issues still await to be solved. In autonomous or composite semi-autonomous exploration of planetary land surfaces, rover localization is such an issue. The rovers of these missions (e.g., the MER and MSL) navigate relatively to their landing spot, ignoring their exact position on...

In this paper, a modified pure-pursuit path following algorithm is presented. The proposed modification utilizes piecewise linear path representation and reduction of lookahead distance based on tracking error. A key safety requirement in application to planetary rovers is to keep the rover within a safety corridor of the path. The main shortcoming...

Exploitation of space must benefit from the latest advances in robotics. On-orbit servicing is a clear candidate for the application of autonomous rendezvous and docking mechanisms. However, during the last three decades most of the trials took place combining extravehicular activities (EVAs) with telemanipulated robotic arms. The European Space Ag...

Exploitation of space must benefit from the latest advances in robotics. On-orbit servicing is a clear candidate for the application of autonomous rendez-vous and docking mechanisms. However, during the last three decades most of the trials took place combining EVAs with telemanipulated robotic arms. The European Space Agency (ESA) considers that g...

Space exploratory rovers do well in autonomous or composite semi-autonomous exploration of extraterrestrial surfaces, yet their localization relies on the particular spot they had landed, rather than being universal, i.e. based on the absolute coordinate system of the explored planet. The idea underlaying the work presented in this paper is the tra...

Deployment actuators of a triple-bogie rover locomotion platform can be used to perform Wheel-Walking (WW) manoeuvres. How WW could affect the traversing capabilities of rovers is a recurrent debate in the planetary robotics community. The Automation and Robotics Section of ESTEC has initiated a long term project to evaluate the performance of WW m...

Exploration of the Moon is considered a high priority in the overall strategy of the European Space Agency (ESA), together with activities in Low Earth Orbit and missions to Mars. The Lunar South Polar region presents key opportunities for scientific discovery and advancement of exploration capabilities, but is also a uniquely challenging operation...

Under the umbrella of the European Space Agency (ESA) StarTiger program, a rapid prototyping study called Seeker was initiated. A range of partners from space and nonspace sectors were brought together to develop a prototype Mars rover system capable of autonomously exploring several kilometers of highly representative Mars terrain over a three-day...

Space debris is an existing and growing problem for space operations. Studies show that for a continued use of LEO, 5-10 large and strategically chosen debris need to be removed every year. The European Space Agency (ESA) is actively pursuing technologies and systems for space debris removal under its Clean Space initiative. One of the most promisi...

In 2008, the European Space Agency (ESA) challenged universities to design, develop, and test teleoperated robotic systems for a soil-sampling mission in a simulated lunar-crater-like environment. Eight teams participated and developed a wide range of engineering solutions that addressed the various technical and operational challenges posed by the...

Arguably Robotics is a main driver for advanced avionics systems in space. While the long advocated capital role of robots for servicing space infrastructure has not yet materialized, robotics is playing an important role in all Exploration activities being undertaken at ESA:

Welcome to a special issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine dedicated to space robotics. This corner of the robotics world has a broad spectrum of activities, as reflected by the diversity of the papers presented herein. Topics range from in situ exploration with landers and rovers to low-gravity surface rendezvous for science and sampling...

Why Subsurface Exploration?Methods for Subsurface Access on Extraterrestrial BodiesGrinders and Rock Abrasion ToolsScoopsMolesUltrasonic and Percussive Actuated DrillsSurface DrillsShallow Drilling: One Meter Class DrillsTen-Meter Class DrillsDeep Drills (>10 m)Past and Present Subsurface Access MissionsFuture Sampling MissionsFuture European Prosp...

The International Symposia on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, and Automation in Space (i-SAIRAS) presented a reported that focused on the progress on AI, robotics, and automation in the field of space explorations. The successful event in the field involved the launch of Dextre in Canada, which was the last element of the Mobile Servicing S...

This paper provides a classification of robotics means for planetary missions with a description of their characteristic, benefits and current and future applications in low cost planetary missions.

Telecommunications satellites are designed for useful lives of 10-15 years before they are "junked" when their propellant runs out. This is a waste of huge catital investments, because all or most of the satellites' revenue-generating communications payloads is still functional. The ConeXpress Orbital Life Extension Vehicle is a novel spacecraft th...

This paper provides an overview of the existing ESA robotics programmes, their perspectives and the possibility for ESA and its European partners to make an adequate, yet significant contribution to international space robotics endeavours. A systematic overview will be given of the application scenarios in Low Earth Orbit (system servicing and payl...

A terrestrial prototype for autonomous deep soil excavation has been designed as a demonstrator for potential future Subsurface Exploration systems. The Ground Mole Demonstrator (GMD) requirements are to excavate a hole down to a depth of 100 m on soils having compressive strength up to 150 MPa, advance in the drilled hole and steer to modify the t...

This presentation reviews the topic of space robotics. In the space jargon, often any unmanned space probe is called a robotic probe. This acknowledges the challenges of largely autonomous operation in a complex mission. In the following, however, the focus will be on space robots: systems involving arms for manipulation or some kind of locomotio...

This Paper describes the design of the ESA Human Arm Exoskeleton, which has been developed to enable force-feedback telemanipulations with redundant robotic arms. It is described, how several shortcomings of previous telemanipulation systems were eradicated, to meet the system requirements for a lightweight, easy wearable and comfortable system. Th...

This Paper describes the design of the ESA Human Arm Exoskeleton, which has been developed to enable force-feedback telemanipulations with redundant robotic arms. It is described, how several shortcomings of previous telemanipulation systems were eradicated, to meet the system requirements for a lightweight, easy wearable and comfortable system. Th...

This paper describes design, manufacturing and testing of a small scaled robotic drilling and sampling system called RoSA. This project was launched by ESTEC in order to study the feasibility of a drilling rover in exobiological exploration on planets, especially Mars. RoSA is a tracked, tethered vehicle, which can drive in harsh off-road condition...

In this paper, three important preparation tasks of a planetary exploration system are described, namely calibration, terrain reconstruction and path planning. The calibration is retrieved from the images of the planetary terrain (the same images from which the 3D measurements of the terrain are obtained). Once the system has been calibrated, the s...

VTT Automation has developed an advanced rover-based mobile drilling device for planetary exploration. The mobile Robotic Sampling System has been designed to perform deep (up to 2 meters) soil sampling on the surface of Mars or other planetary objects. Due to the complexity of the task, very strict mass and volume limitations, and the need for com...

Space robots are driven by requirements for high performance and versatility under extreme constraints of low mass, low energy consumption, and few interaction possibilities with supervising humans. This necessitates high degrees of miniaturisation and autonomy. The paper gives an overview of advanced mechatronic solutions for novel space robot sys...

VTT Automation has developed an advanced rover-based mobile drilling device for planetary exploration. The mobile Robotic Sampling System has been designed to perform deep (up to 2 meters) soil sampling on the surface of Mars or other planetary object. Due to complexity of the task, very limited mass and volume, and the need of complete automation...

This paper describes a mobile Robotic Sampling System designed to perform deep (up to 2 meters) soil sampling on the surface of Mars. Due to the complexity of the task, the very limited mass and volume used and the need of complete automation of all its operations, the system demands for a very ambitious mechatronic design. The description carried...

In April 1998, the first collaboration between ESA and NASDA on space robotics culminated in a very successful demonstration on the Japanese Engineering Test Satellite (ETS) VII. From an ESA control station at NASDA's Tsukuba Space Centre in Japan, a team of ESA and industry staff commanded the satellite's robot arm through a series of a advanced m...

In April 1998 the Vision & Interactive Autonomy Bi-Lateral Experiments (VIABLE) project on the ETS-VII engineering satellite of NASDA, the Japanese Space Agency, entered in its final phase. This first collaboration between ESA and NASDA has the scope to test the Interactive Autonomy concept for space robotics and to investigate advanced vision-base...

Describes work on a large laboratory testbed for space robotics (Columbus Automation and Robotics Laboratory Testbed), able to execute hierarchically organized complex activities, to increase the degree of autonomy of the system. For instance, now the robotic system is able to conclude several activities, like closing a drawer or moving a sample fr...

The geostationary orbit as well as the satellite systems stationed there for telecommunication, TV broadcasting, weather forecasting, etc. have high commercial and strategic value. To safeguard the huge capital investments and the usability of the orbit itself, it will soon be indispensable to have adequate remote intervention means for the servici...

Robotic service vehicles are presently seen as a viable means for performing satellite maintenance and ESA (European Space Agency) is presently investigating the possible characteristics and potential of a Geostationary Service Vehicle (GSV). A stereovision tracking system should be included in this GSV to help the operator track and capture the ta...

The European Space Agency (ESA) has recently completed its technology harmonization exercise for the domain of automation and robotics. The exercise aims at defining a roadmap for research and development, which integrates the vision of all European players (Agencies, Industry and Academia) in the domain. The roadmap defines a series of automation...