Design of a user-friendly control system for planetary rovers with CPS feature Sebastiano Chiodini CISAS ”Giuseppe Colombo” University of Padova Padova, Italy sebastiano.chiodini@unipd.it Riccardo Giubilato Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics DLR Wessling, Germany riccardo.giubilato@dlr.de Marco Pertile Dept. of Industrial Engineering University of Padova Padova, Italy marco.pertile@unipd.it Annarita Tedesco IMS Laboratory University of Bordeaux Bordeaux, France annarita.tedesco@ims-bordeaux.fr Domenico Accardo Dept. of Industrial Engineering University of Napoli Federico II Napoli, Italy domenico.accardo@unina.it Stefano Debei Dept. of Industrial Engineering University of Padova Padova, Italy stefano.debei@unipd.it © 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Abstract—In this paper, we present a user-friendly plane- tary rover’s control system for low latency surface telerobotic. Thanks to the proposed system, an operator can comfortably give commands through the control base station to a rover using commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) joysticks or by command sequencing with interactive monitoring on the sensed map of the environment. During operations, high situational awareness is made possible thanks to 3D map visualization. The map of the environment is built on the on-board computer by processing the rover’s camera images with a visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. It is transmitted via Wi-Fi and displayed on the control base station screen in near real-time. The navigation stack takes as input the visual SLAM data to build a cost map to find the minimum cost path. By interacting with the virtual map, the rover exhibits properties of a Cyber Physical System (CPS) for its self-awareness capabilities. The software architecture is based on the Robot Operative System (ROS) middleware. The system design and the preliminary field test results are shown in the paper. Index Terms—SLAM, ROS, CPS, rover, planetary exploration, telerobotics I. I NTRODUCTION Planetary rovers are measuring system machines, their cam- eras, as well as being indispensable for rover’s operations planning, provide on-site measurements of the geological context. Up to now, due to the latency in uplinking com- mands and downlinking telemetry, operations teams planify rover navigation targets on daily bases and rely on rover’s fault protection, autonomous navigation, and visual odometry software to keep the rover safe during drives [1]. The possibility to control a rover by astronauts located in a control station on the planet’s surface or orbiting the planet paves the way to new explorations capabilities. Indeed, thanks to low latency surface telerobotics, astronauts can be telepresent on the planetary surface in a highly productive manner. As an example, in future NASA and ESA human exploration missions, low latency rover control is foreseen from the crewed module of the Lunar Orbital Platform - Gateway (LOP-G) to carry out astronaut assisted sample return and deployment/construction of a low-frequency radio telescope array [2]. [3] reports the campaign results of how astronauts in the International Space Station (ISS) have re- motely operated a planetary rover for telescope deployment on Earth. The test has been performed by the astronauts using a Space Station Computer (Lenovo Thinkpad laptop), supervisory control (command sequencing with interactive monitoring), teleoperation (discrete commanding), and Ku- band satellite communications to remotely operate a rover. In [4] the authors present the remote operation from a control station located in Bremen, Germany, of a rover located in Mars analogue terrain in the desert of Utah, USA. In [5] is described the ARCHES demonstration missions, where an heterogeneous robotic team will be deployed in the summer of 2021 at a Moon-analogue site on the volcano Mt. Etna on Sicily, Italy. We can consider the latency of a signal to control a teleoperated robot to be low, and thus speak about low-latency telerobotics, if the delay of the signal is small enough not to make teleoperation of a robot unpleasant or impossible [6]. Whereas trained surgeons can even do precision surgical tasks with 500 ms of latency, the latency of a signal between the surface of the Moon and Earth-Moon L1 or L2 is 410 ms, thus low latency teleoperation of rovers on the Moon surface seems to be feasible. [7] quantifies the operational video conditions required for effective exploration for planetary surface operations. Low latency telerobotics have been carried out also for Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) control over 4G network, in [8] near real-time robot control with video stream feedback over a 4G network has been performed. The development of 5G will surely open up new opportunities for even more immersive experiences for rover and UGV control [9]. In the near future, phased array technology could play a significant role in providing high data throughput links from the lunar arXiv:2106.14507v1 [cs.RO] 28 Jun 2021