Space West Newsletter

Foot Anstey is a leading, full service national law firm with a team of specialists who focus on supporting businesses in the space & satellite sector.

Working in and supporting the growth of the UK space and satellite industry, Foot Anstey is one of the few law firms in the UK with the experience, ambition and expertise necessary to provide specialist legal support to space sector businesses and organisations, both upstream and downstream.

Foot Anstey is supporting the development of space clusters and ecosystems across the UK, in line with the National Space Strategy. At the forefront of the latest legal and commercial developments in the space sector, from assessing the impact of the National Security and Investment Act on your organisation to getting your space business investment ready, Foot Anstey harnesses the skills and capabilities of expert lawyers to serve the needs of space sector businesses and organisations.

Foot Anstey has supported nationally significant space projects, working with organisations such as Spaceport Cornwall, Space Engine Systems Ltd, Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd, Piran Composites, Space Professionals and Aspia Space to name a few.

Foot Anstey is a member of key space organisations such as the Space Energy Initiative and is a thought leader providing regular insights for example through our Thinking Global podcast series and speaking at the Space Sustainability Conference in Edinburgh last year.

Foot Anstey provides bespoke legal advice and solutions to support upstream & downstream commercial space sector projects, including:

• satellite earth stations               
• spaceports
• space and satellite supply chain
• advanced manufacturing
• satellite enabled applications
• local authorities.

Foot Anstey offers a broad range of specialist solutions across multiple areas of legal practice, ranging from regulatory, intellectual property to real estate and infrastructure development, to find out more about their services visit their website.

Supporting entrepreneurial businesses

Foot Anstey has recently launched its very own business accelerator programme “Foot Anstey Enterprise”, supporting entrepreneurial businesses operating across the space, energy and marine-tech sectors to optimise their opportunities and achieve their ambitions.  In addition to providing discounted legal and business support, Foot Anstey also provide a range of added value services, including using their own networks and contacts to help businesses grow through making connections across sectors. 

To find out more, visit our website or contact us directly to set up a chat by emailing John Catchpole ([email protected]), Foot Anstey Partner and head of Foot Anstey's Space and Satellite Team.

Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) is the most comprehensive academic centre for multi-disciplinary robotics research in the UK. It is a collaborative partnership between the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) and the University of Bristol, and home to a vibrant community of over 450 academics, researchers and industry practitioners.

Joe Louca is a researcher at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory working with Antonia Tzemanaki, an Assistant Professor in Robotics at the University of Bristol and their work has addresses the key difficulty that robotics in space face around latency.

Teleoperation allows us to bring human decision-making to hard-to-reach places. This will be a key enabler for the next steps of the space industry, such as in-orbit servicing and manufacture of spacecraft, orbital debris management, and in-situ resource utilisation on the Lunar surface. The problem, still yet to be overcome, is how best to perform tasks with the significant communication delays over these distances.

When delays are present, there is an unavoidable delegation of responsibility from the operator to the robot, and for this is to occur smoothly, the operator must trust that the robot will behave as intended.

Through conversations with expert operators of teleoperated robots from other applications, we have identified a list of requirements for what would constitute a trustworthy teleoperation system. Surprisingly, technical features such force-feedback were not prioritised by operators. Instead, they preferred user-centric approaches to build trust, such as providing low risk training environments to become familiar with their systems [DOI: 10.3389/fnbot.2023.1187264]. We are now exploring these requirements experimentally to determine their impact on trustworthiness and performance.

We conducted a user study which confirmed that, although it offers clear benefits without delays, providing force-feedback in delayed systems can actually be counterproductive "Impact of Haptic Feedback in High Latency Teleoperation for Space Applications”, accepted in Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (08/-Feb-2024). Following this, we will investigate whether using a more subtle form of haptic feedback through haptic gloves is more compatible with delays.

Looking towards the Moon, which is of particular interest considering the many Lunar lander missions currently underway, the best-case scenario delays will be 2.6 seconds. So, how can we capture the benefits of haptic feedback under these challenging conditions?

One option may be to operate the robot via a real-time simulation – the operator controls a virtual robot in a virtual world, and real robot on the Moon’s surface copies these movements. If the virtual world is accurate enough, then this could be used to provide force-feedback to help guide the operator. With this in mind, we have experimentally verified a virtual model of lunar regolith to determine how accurately it represents the real world [DOI: 10.3389/frspt.2024.1303964].

In collaboration with the European Space Agency, we are integrating this model with a robot arm test-bed to build a lunar regolith handling system. This could be used to provide stable haptic feedback which is robust to communication delays, or as a low-risk virtual training environment to prepare users for the challenges of operating on the lunar surface.

Link to our lab: https://www.dexterousrobotlab.com/haptics-for-space]

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