Haughton is very interesting because it is a 20-kilometer-diameter impact crater, which is exactly the same scale as Shackleton Crater, the south pole of the Moon. It is completely non-vegetated. During the summer it has extremely strong UV, and it has continuous sunlight, so it’s really good for a number of reasons as a lunar analog. For us it was very useful to test there because during the past 10 years, there’s been a project called the Haughton Mars Project – the PI on that project is Pascal Lee and Chris McKay here at Ames – and they had established a small camp up there and every summer they do a series of experiments. Those experiments range from how you would actually set up and run a greenhouse to things that involve people walking around in suits to understand the physiological impacts of, say, doing a 10-kilometer walk back from an EVA, to our robot testing.

So for us it’s good because there was some infrastructure that was up there that we could take advantage of. It’s good from the standpoint that it’s a really nice lunar analog in terms of an impact structure of the same scale as Shackleton which, of course, is one of the primary targets for NASA as we go back to the Moon.

NTB: What is meant by the term “Intelligent Robotics”? Don’t most robots have a certain amount of intelligence programmed into them?

Fong: To some extent they do, although robotics these days – and we’re taking a very general, broad view of the field of robotics – covers everything from a Roomba vacuum cleaner, to assembly-line stuff, to planetary robotics. We made the distinction that we’re interested in things that are intelligent because they’re self-sufficient - they can figure out where obstacles are in the world so they don’t run into things, and they know how to operate even when they’re disconnected and out of communications range. Those are the kinds of things that assembly-line robots don’t do. Those are the kinds of things a Roomba vacuum cleaner, which has a very limited view of the world until it bumps into something, does not do. So we use the term “intelligent robotics” to really focus on robots that are much more self-sufficient.

Again, I refer to the field test that we did this summer. Our robots operated for probably 200 total hours of operation. About 10 percent of that time they operated completely outside of communications range. We let them go because we knew that they would come back. They were smart enough to know where they were; they were smart enough to avoid obstacles while they were carrying out their survey work. So basically we let them go outside of our wireless communications range, let them finish their work, and then they would come back and we would talk to them once they came back.

NTB: One of the projects you’re currently working on, the Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Interaction Project, is developing techniques to make it easier for humans to communicate with robots.

Fong: The Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Interaction Project was a project that we actually finished almost two years ago. That project was a collaboration with NASA Johnson, the Naval Research Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT. It was a good group of people to work with on a topic that is fundamentally “how do you allow humans and robots to better communicate what they’re doing and to ask for help from each other?”

One of the things you see these days is that NASA, and actually most organizations that use robots, typically view those robots purely as a tool. That works great, except that it requires the human to always be aware of what the robot is doing, constantly monitoring, looking for problems, and trying to figure out when the robot is having a problem. That means the human can’t do anything else; the human is stuck taking care of the robot. What this project was looking at was, “how do you make robots and humans more equal from the sense of being partners as they’re working on a task?”