Interface Design Issues of the Ranger Telerobotics Flight Experiment

While robotics have been employed in many environments, their use in space has been limited by high development costs and reliability issues. Using new management strategies and reduced mission life, the University of Maryland and NASA are developing the Ranger Telerobotic Flight Experiment (TFX), scheduled for flight in early 1997. This mission poses unique requirements on the design and implementation of the ground control station and it's interfaces. Two of the most important design issues are the need for high bandwidth command data, and cost constraints on the operator interface. This paper is intended to briefly outline the Ranger TFX mission, related theory on human perception, capabilities the control station must supply to vehicle designers sot that they can design effective control station interfaces, results from a preliminary study, and suggestions for future research.