These NASA Robots Are Heading to the International Space Station

Inside NASA's Ames Enquiry Center in Silicon Valley is a test environment that simulates the International Space Station's pressurized capsules. Here, aerospace engineers test the new Astrobee intra vehicular activity (IVA) robots, which will be heading to the ISS in the spring.

These robots are 1-by-1-foot cubes, with an assortment of LED communication lights. They can function autonomously or be remotely controlled from Houston. While on the ISS, Astrobees will carry out routine maintenance tasks, like checking inventory with an RFID scanner and using a sensor-array to tape air quality levels, CO2, and radiation. Their HD cameras volition also role every bit the optics and ears for footing control; right now, astronauts accept to wield camcorders upwards there to evidence Houston what'south going on.

Astrobee Robots This is a return visit to NASA Ames for PCMag. We came concluding year to run into Maria Bualat, deputy head of the bureau'southward Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG). Back then, we learned about the K10/KREX rovers, walked on the mocked-upward Mars surface they use to exam rovers, and saw the SPHERES (Synchronised Position Concord, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites), which were used for over a decade, then modified into robots to carry out maintenance tasks under education from astronauts and/or basis control.

At the time, Bualat showed united states a very early prototype of the autonomous Astrobee robot, and NASA invited united states of america to return when they were further down the engineering path. So recently, we came dorsum to interview Dr. Trey Smith, Astrobee Lead Engineer, who started working on NASA projects every bit a student in 1998, and joined NASA's Intelligent Robotics Group full-time in 2007.

Merely as the BB-9E, BB-viii, C-3PO, and R2-D2 droids assisted personnel in the fictional Insubordinate Brotherhood, Astrobee robots accept been engineered to better life onboard the ISS.

"If we can save the crew a couple of hours a twenty-four hours past deploying these gratuitous-flying robots to assist as a research facility, sensor survey device and video link to ground control, that'southward vitally important, every bit astronaut time is the greatest resource up there," Dr. Smith pointed out. "Another thing we want to practice is ensure we don't inconvenience the crew. As the Astrobee can run fully apart, self-docking and setting out to conduct tasks, we need to make sure it's communicating intent while doing that."

The Astrobee squad fellow member running these human-robot interaction experiments is Dr. Yunkyung Kim. She joined NASA last year from Samsung, later on receiving her doctorate from the Korea Advanced Establish of Scientific discipline and Applied science (KAIST), home of the Hubo robot we saw win the DARPA claiming in 2022.

"Equally our resident HRI adept, she'due south been testing different combinations of the LED lights and laser pointer functionality, to see which works all-time," confirmed Dr. Smith. "When it comes to audio we'd like to keep that express to avert bothering the coiffure. The main signal nosotros're working on now is one for entering the hatchway, possibly a bicycle bell or something similar. Information technology'south not silent anyway, I don't want to say information technology sounds similar a hairdryer on total smash, but, well."

Ability is provided by lithium-ion batteries, which, depending on the tasks, will last several hours in operational mode, before self-docking and recharging is required. The Astrobee's computational systems are in a triple processing layer, utilizing Android for high-level operations and Linux for the rest. Fifty-fifty NASA is subject field to fluctuations in supply and demand within the electronics industry.

"When you take a three-year projection, you tin can run into obsolescence with suppliers," Dr. Smith pointed out. "For case, when we went to guild more than cameras, we establish they were obsolete, and so nosotros had to go new cameras, simply when nosotros installed them we found the old processor wouldn't work, so we had to upgrade that too. It'south still a quad-cadre processor merely a more recent version of the Snapdragon chipset. Our original pattern had two Snapdragon 805 SOMs. Now we accept 1 805 and ane 820."

Tech Support in Space

ISS software updates will be tricky. The space station doesn't have Wi-Fi, just information technology does have internet connectivity via NASA's TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellites), an assortment of nine geosynchronous satellites that provide approximately 50Mbit of bandwidth.

"Software updates are pushed very carefully," said Dr. Smith, "and we packet them as debians. Nosotros push software updates to the docking station, using it as a nexus, then you utilize the uplink once, then push the updates to all the Astrobee units, via the dock."

One time it's deployed, there will be three Astrobee robots on the ISS, iii on the ground and four in backup. Yes, they all have names. "The ones on the ISS will be called Honey Bee, Bumble Bee, and Queen Bee. Two of the ground units will be Bee Sharp and Melissa Bee—'melissa' comes from the Greek word for bee."

Astrobee robots are designed to remain active for the life of the ISS, which is currently scheduled to stop in 2024. "There'due south no particular thing nosotros expect to wear out during that period. There'due south probably a new set of batteries that we'll demand to replace, it's possible for the crew to switch out, and we'll accept spares onboard," Dr. Smith said.

As for post-2024, Dr. Smith is coy, as NASA hasn't publicly revealed Astrobee'due south next mission.

"The ISS is 240 miles above Earth. If a future space station is in orbit around the moon that'southward well-nigh 1,000 times farther abroad—and Mars is one,000 times farther away again. We're interested in using the Astrobee for more autonomous space habitats, which might have crews, but those human astronauts could be away role of the time. So nosotros'd want to find a style to handle these fallow periods with robotic assistance, namely future iterations of free flyers like Astrobee and dexterous manipulators like R2. This concept is even so in very embryonic stages, just that'due south i idea moving forwards."

Interestingly plenty, this concept of democratic robots seeking intelligent life in inhospitable places was the focus of Dr. Smith'south PhD.

"One of the nearly profound questions we can ask is: 'Are we alone in the universe?' That's the fundamental principle behind astrobiology," said Dr. Smith. "When I was doing my PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon, I based my thesis on the Life in the Atacama project, an extreme surroundings which is used to do analogous planetary exploration studies.

"Simply put, during that projection, nosotros accomplished what was arguably the kickoff time a robot autonomously discovered life in an farthermost environment," he said.

Then in that location you lot take it: past June 2022, Astrobee will be on the ISS working aslope human astronaut crews. Post-2024, subsequently iterations of the free-flight smart robots could be heading where no robot has gone before, in search of life and helping to establish off-world colonies.