Cooperation of Humans and Robots for Mars (CHARM) exploration was a team project at the Space Studies Programme of 2011 at TU Graz, Austria.
The CHARM team — forty-one professionals from various backgrounds, from nations around the world, but united by a common interest in space exploration — developed a framework to evaluate planetary exploration scenarios involving both humans and robots. The outcome of this project was a report that highlights different factors that affect human-robotic exploration of space, and space projects in general, along with the CHARM model that builds upon these insights to develop feasible mission scenarios for future planetary exploration endeavours. The executive summary and the report can be downloaded from this webpage.
“The CHARM team integrated international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives to investigate Mars exploration objectives, robotic capabilities, and the interaction between humans and robots. Based on the goals of various space agencies, the team developed an exploration objective for the time frame between 2015 and 2035, and drafted different scenarios to accomplish this objective. Each scenario used different degrees of human-robot interaction. A theoretical model was then developed based on discrete requirements to help create an effective combination of human and robots to achieve the mission objective. This model was used to select the most appropriate of the proposed mission scenarios. The CHARM model used an interdisciplinary approach, including technical, societal, political, financial, and scientific perspectives. The CHARM team believes that this decision-making model can be used to select missions more efficiently and rationally, thus enabling greater feasibility to space missions.” – CHARM report
Identity design
I had the privilege to design the graphic and print identity for the CHARM project, including the logo, which symbolises the focus of our project as being the cooperation of humans and robots, through a human eye and a camera lens contained within the zodiac symbol for Mars.
Poster for the 16th Annual ISU Symposium, Strasbourg
Design for information management
Details will be published in February 2012.
In the summer of 2011, I attended the Space Studies Programme organised by the International Space University and hosted by Technische Universität Graz, Austria. Sponsored and supported by the European Space Agency, NASA and many other national space agencies around the world, the programme presented me with the proceedings, materials, processes and techniques within the space industry along with ample networking opportunities to get to know like-minded people from the world over. It took a while to get here, but finally, my October Sky began that summer!