Two papers at SpaceCHI 2026: Robots and Communication across Planets
SpaceCHI 2026 takes place on 24 and 25 September at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The conference is about human-computer interaction for space exploration. We have two papers in the proceedings: one on a testbed for driving (interplanetary) robots with a delay, and one on visual prosody for interplanetary communication.
UNITE: a testbed for driving robots with a delay
Robots on the Moon or on Mars are controlled from Earth, and every command and every camera image arrives late. This delay makes a robot much harder to drive. Researchers build and test interfaces that help operators cope with it, but each lab tends to build its own test setup, and those setups are hard to rebuild, compare, or reuse.
Dries reviewed 83 studies of delayed teleoperation to find out what such a setup has to include. From that review we derived seven requirements, covering communication, input, feedback, vehicle behaviour, assistance, tasks, environments, and data capture. Based on these requirements, Dries built UNITE, an open-source testbed in Unity. A complete experimental setup in UNITE is saved as one configuration file that other researchers can load. To test it, we rebuilt an existing lunar delay study in UNITE. This also showed which parts of the original setup were not described in enough detail to reproduce.
With Dries Cardinaels, Thomas Pietrzak and Raf Ramakers. See the publication, the interactive poster, the Github repo and the project page at Dries his website.
Visual prosody: emotion in text, without losing legibility
Communication between Earth and a crew far away will rely heavily on written messages. Text loses much of what a voice carries, such as tone and emotion. This poster proposes “visual prosody”: changing how text looks so that it conveys emotion, while keeping it easy to read. An interactive poster will follow soon.
With Shichen Zhang and Ann Bessemans. See the publication.