Telerobotics (NASA's Technology Demonstration Missions)

"Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century American poet

Forging a permanent human presence in space requires a great deal of groundwork to be laid -- from deeper understanding of all our future destinations and their environments to extra sets of "eyes" and "hands" that help and protect our astronauts during their journeys in space and long-term expeditions on other worlds. To that end, NASA and its partners rely on a variety of highly capable, versatile and sophisticated robots to investigate worlds beyond our own, refine tools, technologies and systems, complement the work of human astronauts -- and prepare the way for crewed missions to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

The Human Exploration Telerobotics (HET) Technology Demonstration Mission is demonstrating how telerobotics -- remote control of a variety of robotic arms, rovers and other devices -- can take routine, highly repetitive, dangerous or long-duration tasks out of human hands, and improve and hasten human space exploration missions to new destinations.

The team, led by NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., is testing robots remotely operated by controllers on the ground or by astronauts in space. The Human Exploration Telerobotics team also is leading testing of new Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) software for telerobotics to improve network connectivity and minimize delays in data delivery between computers on the ground and robots in space.

The Human Exploration Telerobotics research will continue through 2014.

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