Just as remotely-operated vehicles help humans explore the depths of the ocean from above, NASA has begun studying how a similar approach may one day help astronauts explore other worlds. On June 17 and July 26, NASA tested the Surface Telerobotics exploration concept, in which an astronaut in an orbiting spacecraft remotely operates a robot on a planetary surface. In the future, astronauts orbiting other planetary bodies, such as Mars, asteroids¹（小行星） or the moon, could use this approach to perform work on the surface using robotic avatars. "The initial test was notable for achieving a number of firsts for NASA and the field of human-robotic exploration," said Terry Fong, Human Exploration Telerobotics project manager and director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., which designed and manages the tests. "Specifically, this project represents the first fully-interactive remote operation of a planetary rover by an astronaut in space."

 

During the June 17 test, Expedition 36 Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy of NASA remotely operated the K10 planetary rover in the Roverscape -- an outdoor robotic test area the size of two football fields located at NASA Ames -- hundreds of miles below on Earth's surface from his post aboard the International Space Station (ISS). For more than three hours, Cassidy used the robot to perform a survey of the Roverscape's rocky, lunar-like terrain（地形，地势）.

 

The July 26 test picked up where Cassidy left off. Fellow Expedition 36 Flight Engineer Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency remotely-controlled the rover and began deploying² a simulated Kapton film-based radio antenna³.

 

These tests represent the first time NASA's open-source Robot Application Programming Interface⁴ Delegate (RAPID) robot data messaging system was used to control a robot from space. RAPID originally was developed by NASA's Human-Robotic Systems project and is a set of software data structures and routines that simplify the process of communicating information between different robots and their command and control systems. RAPID has been used with a wide variety of systems including rovers, walking robots, free-flying robots and robotic cranes.

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