The mobile servicing system is being developed in order to assist with the construction and maintenance of the International Space Station Freedom. One important element of the mobile servicing system is the special-purpose dexterous manipulator (SPDM). It is designed to maintain both the mobile servicing system and the space station. The SPDM ground testbed (SPDM-GT) was created to provide facilities for the proof-of-principle demonstrations of advanced technology areas for the SPDM. The mechanical, computer, and software design of the SPDM-GT is discussed, and an overview is given of some of the control experiments that are currently underway.>

A description is given of the Robot Controller Test Station (RCTS), a software environment for implementing, testing, and evaluating robot control and sensor algorithms in both a simulated and a real robot system. RCTS is designed for flexibility, portability, ease of modification and ease of use. The authors discuss many of the design and implementation issues for RCTS. They outline the steps that a researcher can follow in order to integrate a control, sensing hardware interface or data analysis algorithm into an RCTS-based robot system. These steps do not require the researcher to be an expert programmer or even to comprehend the remainder of the robot software, so he or she can concentrate on algorithm design and optimization.>