Sending humans to Mars' surface to build habitats is, for now, prohibitively dangerous and costly. An alternative is to have humans in orbiters, teleoperating robots on Mars to construct habitats, deferring human arrival until these habitats are finished. This paper describes the Kontur-2 experiments, in which the feasibility of this scenario was tested with the International Space Station as an orbiter, a cosmonaut operating a force-feedback joystick as an input device for teleoperation, and Earth as the planet where the teleoperated robot is located. In particular, we focus on human teleoperation performance, which is known to deteriorate under conditions of spaceflight. We investigate whether the provision of force feedback at the joystick is as beneficial as under terrestrial conditions. Our results show that, to support humans operating in weightlessness, haptic assistance needs to be adjusted to the altered environmental condition.

Despite the substantial progression of autonomous driving systems, their application is often limited e.g. due to safety margins which can be caused by uncertainties in the environment reconstruction. Then, via teleoperation as a fallback solution, a human-in-the-loop can be introduced as the main decision maker. However, high delay in the communication channel distorts the performance of direct force feedback teleoperation for example in space or disaster scenarios. On the other hand, model-mediated teleoperation can provide instantaneous and even predictive force feedback to the user, but the performance is limited due to state mismatches, incomplete models, model errors and the modeling challenges of complex wheel-ground contacts. Therefore, in this paper we introduce the concept of extended model-mediated teleoperation with a car like interface for mobile robots by fusing local fictitious and remote force feedback, which can be measured, computed or fictitious. We provide a method to guarantee stability of the extended model-mediated teleoperation (involving time delay, multilateral coupling, fictitious force feedback and permanent updates of the local model) based on the passivity theorem. The benefits of the approach are highlighted by human-in-the-loop experiments with a wheeled mobile robot.

This paper presents a new robot controller for space telerobotics missions specially designed to meet the requirements of KONTUR-2, a German & Russian telerobotics mission that addressed scientific and technological questions for future planetary explorations. In KONTUR-2, Earth and ISS have been used as a test-bed to evaluate and demonstrate a new technology for real-time telemanipulation from space. During the August 2015' experiments campaign, a cosmonaut teleoperated a robot manipulator located in Germany, using a force-feedback joystick from the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS). The focus of the paper is on the design and performance of the bilateral controller between ISS joystick and Earth robot. The controller is based on a 4-Channels architecture in which stability is guaranteed through passivity and the Time Delay Power Network (TDPN) concept. We show how the proposed approach successfully fulfills mission requirements, specially those related to system operation through space links and internet channels, involving time delays and data losses of different nature.