Design of the iMETRO Facility: A Platform for Intravehicular Space Robotics Research

Future missions to explore the lunar and martian surfaces will have an increased need for intravehicular robotics to assist with routine tasks, such inspection, maintenance and repair activities and logistics handling. Offloading some of these tasks to robots will leave more time for astronauts to perform tasks that specifically require astronaut expertise, such as science and exploration. To facilitate the development of intravehicular robotics technology for researchers, the Integrated Mobile Evaluation Testbed for Robotics Operations facility has been created. This facility consists of high-fidelity intravehicular mockups, an example robot, configurable operator paradigms, and open-source software infrastructure. An example demonstration was developed and carried out using these resources to show how partners can build on top of the facility infrastructure for their custom applications. Future work with this facility will provide a dynamic simulation environment and introduce new robotic platforms to further advance the resources available to develop new technologies.