The missions to the Moon and to Mars currently being planned by NASA require the advanced deployment of
robots to prepare sites for human life support prior to the arrival of astronauts. Part of the robot's work will be
the assembly of modular structures such as solar arrays, radiators, antennas, propellant tanks, and habitation
modules. The construction will require teams of robots to work cooperatively and with a certain degree of
independence. Such systems are complex and require of human intervention in the form of teleoperation attending
unexpected contingencies. Latency in communications, however, will require that robots perform autonomous
tasks during this time window. This paper proposes an approach to maximize the likelihood of success for
teams of heterogeneous robots as they autonomously perform assembly tasks using force feedback to guide the
process. An evaluation of the challenges related to the cooperation of two heterogeneous robots to join two
parts into a stable, rigid configuration in a loosely structured environment is conducted. A control basis is
such approach: it recasts a control problem by concurrently running a series of controllers to encode complex
robot behavior. Each controller represents a control law that parses the underlying continuous control space
and provides asymptotic stability, even under local perturbations. The control basis approach allows several
controllers to be active concurrently through the null space control technique. Preliminary experimental results
are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of the control basis to address the challenges of assembly tasks
by teams of heterogeneous robots.
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