An Intelligent Tutor for Tele-robotics Training Leo Hartman 1 Canadian Space Agency, St-Hubert, Québec , J3Y 8Y9 Froduald Kabanza 2 , Khaled Belghith 3 University of Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1 RomanTutor is a tutoring system that uses sophisticated domain knowledge to monitor the progress of students and advise them while they are learning how to operate a space tele- robotic system. It is intended to help train operators of the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) including astronauts, operators involved in ground-based control of SSRMS and technical support staff. Currently there is only a single training facility for SSRMS operations and it is heavily scheduled. The training staff time is in heavy demand for teaching students, developing teaching material and new teaching tools. For example, all SSRMS simulation exercises are developed by hand and this process requires a lot of staff time. Once in orbit ISS astronauts currently have only simple web-based material for skill development and maintenance. For long duration space flight astronauts will require sophisticated simulation tools to maintain skills. RomanTutor addresses these challenges by providing a sophisticated portable training tool. It incorporates a model of the system operations curriculum, a kinematic simulation of the robotics equipment and the ISS and a high performance path planner. For each element of the curriculum that the student is supposed to master, RomanTutor is able to generate example tasks for the student to accomplish within the simulation environment. I. Introduction oman Tutor 1 is a simulation-based tutoring system to support astronauts in learning how to operate the Space Station Remote Manipulator (SSRMS), an articulated robot arm mounted on the international space station (ISS). Figure 1 includes a snapshot of the SSRMS on ISS. Astronauts operate the SSRMS through a workstation located inside one of the ISS compartments. Figure 1 also shows the workstation which has an interface with three monitors, each connected to a camera placed at a strategic location of the ISS. There are a total of 14 cameras on the ISS, but only three of them are seen at a time through the workstation. Roman Tutor’s user interface (Figure 2) resembles that of the robotic workstation. R The SSRMS is a key component of the ISS and is used in the assembly, maintenance and repair of the station, and also for moving payloads from visiting shuttles. Operators manipulating the SSRMS on orbit receive support from ground operations. Part of this support consist in visualizing and validating maneuvers before they are actually carried out. Operators have in principle rehearsed the maneuvers many times on the ground prior to the mission, but unexpected changes are frequent during the mission. In such cases, ground operators may have to generate 3D animations for the new maneuvers and upload them to the operator on the station. So far, the generation of these 3D animations are done manually by computer graphic programmers and thus are very time consuming. RomanTutor integrates robot path-planning and spatial task modeling into an MSS simulator to provide useful feedback to a student operating the SSRMS. To illustrate, when a student is learning to move a payload, RomanTutor invokes a path-planner periodically to check whether there is a path from the current configuration to the target, and provides feedback accordingly. The path planner not only computes collision free paths but is also capable of taking into account the limited direct view of the ISS, the lighting conditions and other safety constraints about operating the SSRMS. In order to improve the ground support operations on the SSRMS, we have developed as part of RomanTutor an automatic task demonstration generator (ATDG) 2 , which generates 3D animations that demonstrate how to perform 1 Research Scientist, Space Technologies, 6767 Airport Rd, St-Hubert, Quebec J3Y 8Y9. 2 Professor, Département d'informatique. 3 Ph.D. Candidate, Département d'informatique. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 1