February 21 to 23 saw one of the outstanding milestone events of the FACILITATORS, ERGO and ESROCOS project development plan. On these three days the Critical Design Reviews (CDRs) of these three projects were held within the PERASPERA space-robotics program, to set out detailed designs and prototypes.  

The PERASPERA program comes under the European Union’s umbrella H2020 program. Its purpose is to plan a European roadmap and activities for space exploitation of robotics and autonomy, doing so by means of a Strategic Research Cluster (SRC) on space robotics technologies. The goal of this cluster is to consolidate space-robotics technologies designed for in orbit servicing and planet exploration missions. PERASPERA is being coordinated by the Programme Support Activity (PSA), whose partners are the European Space Agency (ESA) itself, the Spanish Industrial-Technology Development Center (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial: CDTI) and the national space agencies of Italy, France, Germany and the UK: Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) and the UK Space Agency (UKSA).

The program has been broken down into several phases; the first involves the development of six different technological blocks that try between them to cater for all the requirements of future space missions.  GMV is leading 3 of them: the European Space Robotics Control and Operating System (ESROCOS), centering on the creation of operational software capable of controlling a space-robotics system in all mission phases; the European Robotics Goal-Oriented Autonomous Controller (ERGO), the block designed to develop the autonomy system for planning, scheduling and overseeing the execution of elementary actions of robotics systems; and Facilities for Testing Orbital and Surface Robotics Building Blocks (FACILITATORS), involving the testing phase for orbital and planetary scenarios, including the development of facilities for validation of robotics systems and the organization of field-testing campaigns in analog environments of the earth.

To carry out this milestone event the consortium partners of each project, the European Commission’s technical officer plus the PSA representatives came together in GMV’s head office to weigh up the three projects. All three came through this assessment with flying colors. This means that ESROCOS, ERGO and FACILITATOR, projects of the first SRC call (2016), have now crossed their equator and embark on the final phase, which will see the start of implementation of all developed technology.

At the moment bids are being drawn up for the new activities pertaining to the second phase of the PERASPERA program (call 2018), including 5 new activities. The purpose of this new call is to integrate the first-call building blocks into on-ground demonstrators, towards applications of space robotics in the field of orbital applications (services, refueling, in-orbit reconfiguration and assembly) and planetary use (exploration and cooperation with scientific purposes and for infrastructure construction).

These robotics applications address not only the future needs of space exploration and exploitation but also potential spin-off effects in other areas of robotic activity on earth, such as agricultural, automotive, mining, nuclear-energy, or even underwater applications. Moreover, the activities selected for the second call enhance and foster commercialization of New Space and Industry 4.0.