Shared control for robotic on-orbit servicing

A shared control approach is proposed to reveal the synergies of visual servoing and telepresence in a robotic on-orbit servicing scenario. Both methods, visual servoing and telepresence, have their respective strengths and are subject to challenges for the task at hand. In a shared control approach, the advantages of a human operator in the loop, its ability to react and adapt to unanticipated and versatile change of conditions, outlast. While the visual servoing, for a controlled range of conditions, has the ability to achieve the task autonomously and, running on-board, without performance degradation due to the communication delay. In the proposed approach, the autonomy module can support the operator and reduce his workload. Already implemented as well as future features and ideas are presented in the following.