Abstract: wing insight into the complexity and cost of in-orbit operations of future space missions strengthens the belief that a significant amount of automation will be needed to operate the orbital laboratories in a safe, efficient, and economic way. Thus, Automation & Robotics (A&R) technology is vital for unmanned exploration missions to comets and planets. While part of the space worksite may be structured, the space environment is generally unstructured. By `structured,' we mean environments that are designed and engineered to somehow `cooperate' with the machine. In addition, the structured part of the space worksite may be damaged or in an unknown condition. This lack of structure, as well as the non-repetitive nature of the tasks, require constant adaptation to the space environment by the robot. This is the motivation for increased space robot autonomy. However, complete autonomy is still beyond the scope of today's state-of-the-art in the case of a system executing a complete mission in a hazardous environment such as space. A systematic approach for the development of A&R technologies will reduce the lead-times and costs of facilities for recurrent basic tasks. A space robotic workcell (SRW) is a collection of robots, sensors, and other industrial equipment grouped in a cooperative environment to perform various complex tasks in space. Due to their distributed nature, the control and programming of SRWs is often a difficult task. The issues involved in order to design a real-time teleprogrammable SRW system that performs intervention tasks at remote unstructured sites are summarized. The concept of `remotely operated autonomous robots' (i.e., robots teleprogrammed and telesupervised at the task level while at a space worksite) is also developed via telepresence for human- machine interface and voice/speech programming. This paper makes an assessment of the role that teleprogramming may have in furthering the automation capabilities of space teleoperated robotic devices. Finally, programming results for our SRW system are presented. !24
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