METERON SUPVIS Justin: The first intelligent robotic co-worker for astronauts

DLRRMC

On August 25th 2017, ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli became the first human to collaborate with an intelligent service robot from space. During the METERON SUPVIS Justin Experiment, DLR humanoid robot Rollin’ Justin was instructed to service a simulated Martian solar farm on Earth. A tablet computer on board the International Space Station let the crew supervise the robot with abstract commands. Rollin’ Justin is capable of a wide variety of tasks, like to connect a data interface probe to the solar panels, inspect the system status, or perform updates. The intuitive user interface inspired Nespoli to train two more NASA Astronauts in flight. Jack Fisher was able to get up to speed with the system in a few minutes. With our scheduled crew time running out, Randy Bresnik still successfully performed an additional maintenance task. This two hour ISS crew session gave us our first insights into how astronauts can collaborate with remote robots as co-workers. The data we collected will serve as the baseline of our continuing endeavor to create better robot assistants for future space exploration.

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