Congratulations to Ioannis-Marios Stavropolous for his accepted paper into ICSR 2026! Abstract below.
Rigorous safety standards in space robotics require human-in-the-loop operation, thus limiting the level of robotic autonomy that can be deployed in practice. While shared control approaches are effective in low-latency settings, high communication delays force operators into inefficient move-and-wait strategies. Supervisory control has therefore emerged as a promising alternative for distant space missions like station keeping duties and assembly. However, existing solutions often rely on non-scalable task representations, such as Finite State Machines (FSMs) or provide immersive interfaces primarily designed for low-level robot control. As a result, they offer limited support for specifying complex tasks and managing execution failures in a structured and recoverable way. In this work, we present an AR-supported supervisory control system for in-space assembly tasks that allows operators to specify assembly goals directly within a 3D AR environment and executes them using behavior trees (BTs). BTs enable failure detection and recovery, while the AR interface provides visual feedback when failures occur. We evaluate the proposed approach in a user study comparing supervisory control with a shared control baseline under two communication latency conditions (0s and 2s delay). Our results indicate that supervisory control significantly reduces task completion time, operator effort and workload, while improving robotic motion efficiency and usability. Furthermore, supervisory control remains robust under communication delay, whereas shared control performance degrades.
Reference
Stavropolous, I-M., Kucukyilmaz, A., Martinez, C., Finnegan, D. J., Hernandez, J. H.
Supervisory Control via AR for Teleoperation under Communication Delays: An In-Space Assembly Use Case
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Social Robotics
PDF: Forthcoming
DOI: Forthcoming
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1169-2842
