NASA's Valkyrie robot, ready to be inhabited through virtual reality I am standing before one of the most advanced robots in the world and am awestruck and disoriented by its humanoid form. Part Transformer, part Star Wars stormtrooper and with hands that look like they can crush beer cans, at 1.8 metres tall and weighing 120 kilograms, NASA's Valkyrie robot is an intimidating figure. But it is the face that most transfixes me.

Technology has come a long way since robots were first introduced into the automotive industry more than 50 years ago. However, although robots can weld, paint and assemble car parts, they are still far from becoming equivalent to human workers, said Taskin Padir, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University. "The robots we have that are currently state-of-the-art do not come anywhere close to human capabilities, in terms of accuracy and control said Padir. "We still need to make significant improvements on that front." One of the biggest challenges is duplicating the extremely fine finger and hand motions humans can perform. Robots simply don't have the dexterity required to do tasks that are simple for humans, such as tie a knot, strip the casing off a cable, insert a pin in a hole or use a hand tool such as a drill, said Padir. In addition, today's robots lack perception of the world around them and the ability to adjust their actions if their environment changes. "We still needed to work quite a bit on a robot's perception so a robot can look at a tabletop and figure out OK, here is the screwdriver, here is the part that I am assembling, so I better pick up the screwdriver and start working on," said Padir. "Currently what we do is pre-program all of these actions in a sequence that a robot acts out.

Four sister robots built by NASA could be pioneers in the colonization of Mars, part of an advance construction team that sets up a habitat for more fragile human explorers. But first they're finding new homes on Earth and engineers to hone their skills. The space agency has kept one Valkyrie robot at its birthplace, the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It has loaned three others to universities in Massachusetts and Scotland so professors and students can tinker with the 1.8-metre tall, 125-kilogram humanoids and make them more autonomous. One of the robots, nicknamed Val, still hasn't quite harmonized its 28 torque-controlled joints and nearly 200 sensors after arriving at a robotics centre at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Northeastern University Ph.D. student Murphy Wonsick adjusts the leg of a six-foot-tall, 125 kg Valkyrie robot at University of Massachusetts-Lowell's robotics centre in Lowell, Mass.

In this May 2, 2016 photo, researchers watch a six-foot-tall, 300-pound Valkyrie robot walk slowly at University of Massachusetts-Lowell's robotics center in Lowell, Mass. "Val," one of four sister robots built by NASA, could be the vanguard for the colonization of Mars by helping to set up a habitat for future human explorers. NASA spokesman Jay Bolden says the agency aims to get to Mars by 2035 and it'll be the Valkyries or their descendants paving the way.

This paper introduces the Affordance Template framework used to supervise task behaviors on the NASA-JSC Valkyrie robot at the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials. This framework provides graphical interfaces to human supervisors that are adjustable based on the run-time environmental context (e.g., size, location, and shape of objects that the robot must interact with, etc.). Additional improvements, described below, inject degrees of autonomy into instantiations of affordance templates at run-time in order to enable efficient human supervision of the robot for accomplishing tasks.