USING NASREM FOR REAL-TIME SENSORY INTERACTIVE ROBOT CONTROL

The Flight Telerobotic Servicer (FTS) is a robotic device which will b e used to build and maintain Space Station Freedom. The FTS is expecte d to evolve from its initial capability of teleoperation toward greate r autonomy by taking advantage of advances in technology as they becom e available. In order to support this evolution, NASA has chosen the N ASA/NIST Standard Reference model for Telerobot Control System Archite cture (NASREM) as the FTS functional architecture. As a result of the definition of generic interfaces in NASREM, the system can be modified without major impact. Consequently, different approaches to solve a p roblem can be tested easily. This paper describes the implementation o f NASREM in the NIST laboratory. The approach is to build a flexible t estbed to enhance research in robot control, computer vision, and rela ted areas. To illustrate the real-time aspects of the implementation, a sensory interactive motion control experiment will be described.