Planning 3D Task Demonstrations of a Teleoperated Space Robot Arm

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We present an automated planning application for generating 3D tasks demonstrations involving a teleoperated robot arm on the the International Space Station (ISS). A typical task demonstration involves moving the robot arm from one configuration to another. Our objective is to automatically plan the position of virtual cameras to film the arm in a manner that conveys the best awareness of the robot trajectory to the user. Given a new task, or given changes to a task previously planned, our system automatically and efficiently generates 3D demonstrations of the task without the intervention of a computer graphics programmer. For a given task, the robot trajectory is generated using a path planner. Then we consider the filming of the trajectory as a sequence of shots satisfying some temporally extended goal conveying constraints on the desirable positioning of virtual cameras. Then a temporal-logic based planning system (TLPlan) is used to generate a 3D movie satisfying the goal. One motivation for this application is to eventually use it to support ground operators in planning mission tasks for the ISS. Another motivation is to eventually use automatically generated demonstrations in a 3D training simulator to provide feedback to student astronauts learning to manipulate the robot arm. Although motivated by the ISS application, the key ideas underlying our system are potentially useful for automatically filming other kinds of complex animated scenes.