Abstract:

Future lunar and planetary missions are expected to rely on remotely operated surface robots, making communication delay unavoidable. Because this delay degrades teleoperation, researchers develop and evaluate interfaces and control techniques for working under delayed feedback. These evaluations often use custom setups that are difficult to reconstruct, compare, and reuse. To identify the parts a reusable setup must capture, we conducted a scoping review of 83 studies of delayed human-in-the-loop mobile teleoperation. The review identified seven requirements for communication, input, feedback, vehicle behavior, assistance, tasks, environments, and data capture. We used these requirements to build UNITE, an open-source modular Unity testbed that captures the full apparatus as a shareable configuration. We demonstrate UNITE by reconstructing a lunar-delay study without changing the architecture. The reconstruction showed that UNITE could represent the study while making under-specified apparatus choices explicit, illustrating how the testbed supports reproducing, comparing, and extending delayed space-teleoperation experiments without rebuilding the apparatus.

Cite (BibTeX):

@inproceedings{cardinaels2026unite,
  author    = {Cardinaels, Dries and Pietrzak, Thomas and Ramakers, Raf and Luyten, Kris},
  title     = {UNITE: A modular testbed for reproducible delayed space teleoperation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of SpaceCHI 2026: Advancing human-computer interaction for space exploration},
  series    = {SpaceCHI '26},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Springer Nature},
  address   = {Mountain View, CA, USA}
}