Researchers are one giant leap closer to solving one of the biggest challenges that space agencies—and video gamers—face: laggy controls.
The issue stems from the naturally occurring communication delay that occurs between space engineers and the faraway rovers they’re operating on places like the moon. Engineers can’t immediately see what obstacles or issues the machines on the ground might be facing—problems that could be exacerbated if the human operator is in a low-gravity environment like an orbital spacecraft.
That’s why researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the European Space Agency (ESA) developed an innovative way to address these issues using haptic feedback, or technology that creates a sensory touch experience.
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“If you want to tie your shoelaces, you could do it without looking at it. We don’t even need to look at our shoes. We just feel it,” Thomas Krüger, a team lead and lead developer for the Human Robot Interaction Lab at the ESA, told The Daily Beast. “But if we lose that feedback, like when our fingers are frozen, it becomes almost impossible because we lose the sense of touch.”
Krüger was a part of the team that helped develop a new robot that can provide that sense of touch to its operator. In a paper of their study published in Science Robotics on Wednesday, the authors illustrate how an astronaut in the International Space Station successfully drove a two-arm rover through an imitation lunar site in a warehouse 250 miles away on the surface of Earth. The operator collected several rock samples using the experimental controls, which provided an appropriate haptic response when handling the rocks.
“It mimics the movements the operator does,” Krüger said. “So if it hits something, the robot measures the force, sends the measurement to the operator, and the device—which has an activated motor—gives the operator an elastic response to what the robot feels.”
Using the new tech, the astronaut was able to have greater control over a rover while accommodating the communication delay. The team now hopes that the technology will also provide a greater degree of flexibility when exploring places like the moon or Mars. After all, when you send an astronaut to the surface, they need a way to launch back up, which creates a whole host of logistical problems. But that’s not necessarily an issue with rovers.
“We can send a human to orbit Mars, send the robots down to do whatever we want—geological experiments, collect rocks, build infrastructure—and leave the robots there,” Krüger said.
Krüger added that the tech will likely play a large role in the future as the Artemis program, NASA’s vision to take humans back to the moon, gets ready for its first set of crewed launches. One of the big goals for the project is construction of the Lunar Gateway, a planned outpost that’s supposed to orbit the moon and support the new lunar exploration program. From there, astronauts would be able to operate rovers and collect samples on the moon without ever having boots on the ground.
“When we have the Lunar Gateway, the astronauts will be sitting there and there will be robots on the lunar surface,” Krüger explained. “We don’t have that yet—but we need to investigate what kind of technological developments we need to really control it.”
