The International Space Station sits at an elevation of around 220 miles above the Earth in this image taken by Expedition 27 team member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 following its undocking.( AP/NASA)
InsideNASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is a test environment that mimics the International Space Station’s pressurized pills. Here, aerospace engineers test the brand-new Astrobee intra automobile activity (IVA) robots, which will be heading to the ISS in the spring.
Theserobots are 1-by-1-foot cubes, with a selection of LED interaction lights. They can work autonomously or be from another location managed fromHouston While on the ISS, Astrobees will perform regular upkeep jobs, like inspecting stock with an RFID scanner and utilizing a sensor-array to record air quality levels, CO2, and radiation. Their HD video cameras will likewise work as the eyes and ears for ground control; today, astronauts have to wield camcorders up there to program Houston exactly what’s going on.
This is a return see to NASA Ames for PCMag. We came in 2015 to fulfill Maria Bualat, deputy head of the firm’s Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG). Back then, we found out about the K10/ KREX rovers, strolled on the mocked-up Mars surface area they utilize to test rovers, and saw the SPHERES (SynchronisedPosition Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites), which were utilized for over a years, and after that customized into robots to perform upkeep jobs under guideline from astronauts and/or ground control.
Atthe time, Bualat revealed us a really early model of the self-governing Astrobee robotic, and NASA welcomed us to return when they were even more down the engineering course. So just recently, we returned to interviewDr Trey Smith, Astrobee Lead Engineer, who began dealing with NASA tasks as a trainee in 1998, and signed up with NASA’s Intelligent Robotics Group full-time in 2007.
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Just as the BB-9E, BB-8, C-3PO, and R2-D2 androids helped workers in the imaginary Rebel Alliance, Astrobee robots have actually been crafted to enhance life onboard the ISS.
“If we can save the crew a couple of hours a day by deploying these free-flying robots to assist as a research facility, sensor survey device and video link to ground control, that’s vitally important, as astronaut time is the greatest resource up there,”Dr. Smith mentioned. “Another thing we want to do is ensure we don’t inconvenience the crew. As the Astrobee can run fully autonomously, self-docking and setting out to conduct tasks, we need to make sure it’s communicating intent while doing that.”
TheAstrobee employee running these human-robot interaction experiments isDr YunkyungKim She signed up with NASA in 2015 from Samsung, after getting her doctorate from the KoreaAdvanced Institute of Science and Technology ( KAIST), house of the Hubo robotic we saw win the DARPA obstacle in 2015.
“As our resident HRI expert, she’s been testing different combinations of the LED lights and laser pointer functionality, to see which works best,” validatedDr Smith. “When it comes to audio we’d like to keep that limited to avoid bothering the crew. The main signal we’re working on now is one for entering the hatchway, maybe a bicycle bell or something similar. It’s not silent anyway, I don’t want to say it sounds like a hairdryer on full blast, but, well.”
Power is offered by lithium-ion batteries, which, depending upon the jobs, will last a number of hours in functional mode, prior to self-docking and charging is needed. The Astrobee’s computational systems are in a triple processing layer, using Android for top-level operations and Linux for the rest. Even NASA is subject to changes in supply and need within the electronic devices market.
“When you have a three-year project, you can run into obsolescence with suppliers,”Dr. Smith mentioned. “For example, when we went to order more cameras, we found they were obsolete, so we had to get new cameras, but when we installed them we found the old processor wouldn’t work, so we had to upgrade that too. It’s still a quad-core processor but a more recent version of the Snapdragon chipset. Our original design had two Snapdragon 805 SOMs. Now we have one 805 and one 820.”
TechSupport in Space
ISS software application updates will be challenging. The spaceport station does not have Wi-Fi, however it does have web connection through NASA’s TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellites), a selection of 9 geosynchronous satellites that offer around 50 Mbit of bandwidth.
“Software updates are pushed very carefully,” statedDr Smith, “and we package them as debians. We push software updates to the docking station, using it as a nexus, so you utilize the uplink once, then push the updates to all the Astrobee units, via the dock.”
Once it’s released, there will be 3 Astrobee robots on the ISS, 3 on the ground and 4 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.”
Astrobeerobots are created to stay active for the life of the ISS, which is presently set up to end in2024 “There’s no particular thing we expect to wear out during that period. There’s probably a new set of batteries that we’ll need to replace, it’s possible for the crew to switch out, and we’ll have spares onboard,”Dr Smith stated.
As for post-2024,Dr Smith is coy, as NASA hasn’t openly exposed Astrobee’s next objective.
“The ISS is 240 miles above Earth. If a future space station is in orbit around the moon that’s about 1,000 times further away—and Mars is 1,000 times further 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 part of the time. So we’d want to find a way to handle these dormant periods with robotic assistance, namely future iterations of free flyers like Astrobee and dexterous manipulators like R2. This concept is still in very embryonic stages, but that’s one idea moving forwards.”
Interestingly enough, this idea of self-governing robots looking for smart life in unwelcoming locations was the focus ofDr Smith’s PhD.
“One of the most profound questions we can ask is: ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ That’s the fundamental principle behind astrobiology,” statedDr Smith. “When I was doing my PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon, I based my thesis on the Life in the Atacama job, a severe environment which is utilized to do comparable planetary expedition research studies.
“Simply put, throughout that job, we attained exactly what was perhaps the very first time a robotic autonomously found life in a severe environment,” he stated.
So there you have it: by June 2018, Astrobee will be on the ISS working together with human astronaut teams. Post-2024, later on versions of the free-flying wise robots might be heading where no robotic has actually preceded, searching for life and assisting to develop off-world nests.
This short article initially appeared on PCMag.com.
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