Uninterrupted hand-over between ground stations for immersive telerobotics

Mars missions are complex and costly operations, which need not only be carefully planned, but rehearsed as completely as possible. This paper describes a work that aims enhancing the rehearsing of one specific mission, controlling a rover or a robot on surface of Mars from a manned orbiter. A METERON experiment and architecture is ESA's approach selected for carrying out this planning and practicing work. Current METERON architecture allows only a limited continuous time window for communications, restricted by the duration of the line-of-sight while ISS is passing a ground station. This paper discusses the effort to extend this typically 7 minute continuous time window to 20 minute continuous communications expected to be available during Mars orbiter's pass. The selected approach is performing handovers from one ground station to another as ISS progresses along its path, so that ISS will receive continuous stream of data from one ground station at the time without connection breaks. The work described in this paper explains the architectural choices, the implemented test-beds, and how the tests were carried out. While the study has demonstrated that the approach is feasible without costly changes to ISS, it also points out some necessary improvements to METERON that are needed in order to implement the handovers the way proposed in the solution.