

NASA considers manned outpost around moon to control robots on lunar surface - diwank
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46354336/ns/technology_and_science/

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jws
Driving remote controlled robots on the dark side is the excuse for storing
people at the L2 point opposite the moon.

How about we just put a repeater at L4 and L2 and leave the humans home? Or
three repeaters in lunar orbit if we don't want to clutter up L4 and L2.

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rlpb
What would that do to latency?

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maaku
On the order of seconds, which is really not a problem (I work at NASA and
we've tested remote vehicle operation in analogue environments with 3+ second
RTT. The operators adjust to it pretty fast).

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melling
Wouldn't it be cheaper and better to develop the robots to be autonomous?

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m3koval
Nothing is cheap about autonomy, especially when there is limited computing
power on-board the robot and power consumption is a major constraint.

Using a hybrid remote operated/autonomous approach is reasonable, though: only
send high level commands to the robot. These commands require less bandwidth
and are less impacted by latency, so it's the best of both worlds. I believe
NASA already does something like this on the Mars rovers by allowing the
operator to specify waypoints and letting the robot plan their own paths
between the waypoints.

