On July 28th 2014, 23:47 UTC, the European Space Agency launched the Haptics-1 Kit to the International Space Station (ISS) on its last Automated Transfer Vehicle ATV-5. The Kit reached the station two weeks later, marking the first haptic master device to enter the ISS. The first force-feedback and human perceptual motor performance tests started to take place on December 30th 2014, and are the first of their kind in the history of spaceflight. Three astronauts participated in the Haptics-1 experiment until November 2015, allowing the investigation of the effects of microgravity on various psycho-motor performance metrics related with the usage of haptic feedback. Experiments are conducted following full adaptation to the space environment (after 3 months in space). This paper introduces the Haptics-1 experiment and associated hardware. Detailed experimental results are reported from a first stiffness just noticeable difference (JND) experimental study in space, carried out on the ISS and pre-flight on ground with 3 astronauts. The first findings from the experiment show no major alterations in-flight, when compared to on-ground data, if the manipulandum is secured in flight against a sufficiently stiff reference structure.

This paper introduces a new Learning from Demonstration (LfD)-based method that makes usage of robot effector forces and torques recorded during expert demonstrations, to generate force-based haptic guidance reference trajectories on-line, that are intended to be used during haptic shared control for additional operator 'guidance'. Derived haptic guidance trajectories are superimposed to master-device inputs and feedback forces within a bilateral control experiment, to assist an operator by the guidance during peg-in-hole insertion. We show that 96 peg-in-hole expert demonstrations were sufficient to obtain a good model of the task, which was used on-line to generate haptic guidance trajectories in real-time with a 1kHz sampling rate.

In a typical space teleoperation task, mismatches between the viewing direction of the operator and the direction of their required control input are often unavoidable. To execute these tasks, the operator is then required to perform mental rotations. Recent studies have shown that the task performance can thereby significantly decrease. In this paper, for the first time, the influence of mental rotations on task performance is studied if hap tic feedback is provided to the operator. A human factors experiment is conducted which analyses the influence of two different hap tic feedback control methods via various visual missmatch angles. The rotation is thereby set to the extreme cases of 0. and 180.To clearly analyze the effects. The first hap tic feedback method consists of direct, scaled force and torque feedback to the operator as measured by a force/torque sensor at the slave robot. The second method consists of hap tic shared control which provides artificially generated guidance forces to the operator. It is shown that mental rotations decrease teleoperation performance despite the addition of direct force feedback. In contrast, hap tic shared control provides lower increase in the operator mental workload and also less between-operator variability of errors made due to the mental rotations.