Keynote Talk 1

Space is a rich and highly variable domain for the application of robotic & automated systems. The applications environment is often unstructured, unpredictable, fast changing, and poorly suited - in the sense of both system performance and risk - to use of heuristics to address the unexpected. These comments become more specific in the consideration of autonomous surface mobility (e.g. rovers for science exploration) and high dexterity remote robotic operations (e.g. tele-manipulation with human in-loop commanding and time delay). We overview the current art for these two application areas, discuss R&D examples developed to date toward more adaptive capabilities within, and outline some open research challenges to future learning and adaptive perception & control in space robotics.