Robotic assembly and maintenance of future space stations based on the ISS mission operations experience

Specifically, our experience shows that past and current space Shuttle and ISS assembly and maintenance operations have used the approach of extensive preflight mission planning and training to prepare the flight crews for the entire mission. This has been driven by the overall communication latency between the earth and remote location of the space station/vehicle as well as the lack of consistent robotic and interface standards. While the early Shuttle and ISS architectures included robotics, their eventual benefits on the overall assembly and maintenance operations could have been greater through incorporating them as a major design driver from the beginning of the system design. Lessons learned from the ISS highlight the potential benefits of real-time health monitoring systems, consistent standards for robotic interfaces and procedures and automated script-driven ground control in future space station assembly and logistics architectures. In addition, advances in computer vision systems and remote operation, supervised autonomous command and control systems offer the potential to adjust the balance between assembly and maintenance tasks performed using extra vehicular activity (EVA), extra vehicular robotics (EVR) and EVR controlled from the ground, offloading the EVA astronaut and even the robotic operator on-orbit of some of the more routine tasks. Overall these proposed approaches when used effectively offer the potential to drive down operations overhead and allow more efficient and productive robotic operations.