NASA has teamed up with a small robotics company in Texas to continue the space agency’s decades-long effort to develop humanoid robots. Soon such robots could be sent into orbit or even to other planets to assist astronauts in their work.

Texas company Apptronik, Inc. The company has long been working with NASA under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract program to improve the capabilities of Apollo, the humanoid robot it developed for ground-based missions such as logistics, manufacturing and home health care. Meanwhile, NASA has become very interested in adapting Apollo (and robots like it) to assistant astronauts living and working in orbit, on the Moon, and even on Mars.

They might even one day function as remote-controlled “avatars” operated by human operators on the ground on other worlds.

Apptronik paid special attention to the modularity of Apollo’s design, especially its adaptability to logistics tasks. Standing 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 160 pounds (73 kilograms), Apptronik says on its website that the Apollo will have a runtime of about four hours on a single battery and a payload capacity of 55 pounds (25 kg). So NASA’s interest should come as no surprise, even though its primary market is now customers from Earth (retail operations, warehousing, and manufacturing).

Apollo’s promised flexibility will mean that it should have some degree of reprogramming and physical customization. It currently has different levels of dexterity, standalone features, and different tools to equip it, but more features are likely to evolve as development progresses.

To that end, NASA is lending its decades of expertise in robotics to help advance Apollo in areas such as robot mobility and software development principles for safe human-robot interaction.

“By applying NASA’s expertise in human-safe mobile robots to commercial projects, together we can lead innovation in this important field,” Sean Azimi, NASA’s Johnson Space Center robotics team leader, said in a statement from NASA. “We are proud that the results of our efforts will benefit the American economy and help people work safely and efficiently here on Earth and possibly in space exploration.”

It is not difficult to understand that it is a discharge lunar landing module Using robots instead of humans for crewed landings on the Moon or Mars would be a much safer and more efficient operation. And given the unforgiving environment on both worlds, robots will almost certainly need to be an integral part of any mission if it is to be successful in the long term.

It operates as a special purpose landing ship, travelers and even aerial drones already operate on other worlds, but general-purpose robots are an entirely different matter. Such robots will be able to solve tedious or dangerous tasks on the surface of the moon or Mars much more easily and safely than humans and, in principle, can be reprogrammed to perform a new task (even tasks unknown to their designers) when needed. I thought about it when they created it.

Making such robots available to human researchers would allow astronauts and ground operations to focus on science and more important tasks than things like building shelters or excavating rock samples.

Additionally, these robots could help operate and maintain mining and manufacturing facilities that can locally process local resources on other worlds, greatly reducing NASA’s costs of supporting these missions. After all, it would be much cheaper and more practical to build a human habitat out of concrete made from lunar regolith than to ship it all the way from Earth.

Therefore, the use of robots in future missions of NASA’s Artemis program could be critical to establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon and, someday, Mars. Naturally, it’s no surprise that NASA has so many robotic irons in the fire.

Similar to Apptronik’s Apollo robot, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is launching the CoSTAR project, an initiative to adapt commercially available robots for autonomous navigation on the Moon and the surface of Mars.

We also can’t forget NASA’s Dragonfly mission, scheduled to launch in 2027, which will land an autonomous rotorcraft on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in 2034. This robot will fly farther and faster over Titan’s terrain than any rover on the ground. He could pull it off, and developing a rotorcraft is serious business for an agency with very high stakes.

While NASA’s current humanoid robot, Valkyrie, is capable of assisting astronauts as designed by Apptronik for Apollo, commercial robots in development or the adaptation of already existing commercial robots for space operations are very promising for an area the agency has ignored.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program does something similar when ordering specialized vehicles (like Crew Dragon). SpaceX) for spaceflight rather than building its own individual rockets and capsules, and the program has been instrumental in revitalizing the U.S. space industry over the past few years. It saved NASA tens of billions of dollars. Advocates say it would make sense to apply the same strategy to space robots, especially given the maturity level of the private robotics industry.

But this isn’t just for NASA’s benefit. Just as the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s was one of the main drivers of semiconductor development in the United States, NASA’s collaboration and funding on advanced robotics development will almost certainly benefit the economy as a whole in unforeseen ways. But it’s almost a guarantee that technology created for future NASA missions will eventually aim to meet the needs of consumers and other sectors of society, such as university researchers and nonprofits.

Just as Silicon Valley’s integrated circuits moved from the Apollo command computer to personal computers in people’s homes in just a decade, the development of advanced robotics for space will have far-reaching impacts on autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, and more, with even greater impacts. is keenly felt by society as a whole.

Even if truly functional humanoid space robots are years from now (if they ever will be), the investments NASA is making now should accelerate the deployment of more practical robotics on Earth (which is almost as good as it is in reality) and many other practical things. Source