…, But That May Not Be a Super Idea.
"What is your favorite space robot? How about stalwart Opportunity, still doing Martian science 11 years after its mission was supposed to end? Canadarm2 is another strong candidate: The 58-foot-long, seven-jointed robot put the International Space Station together, grappling from module to module like a slo-mo ninja warrior. Or maybe you're more of a humanoid C-3PO fan. In that case, there's the R5, a bipedal droid from NASA that can do all the repetitive and dangerous things that humans are too busy, bored, or susceptible to radiation to perform. Well, in theory.
Fact is, humanoid robots aren't quite there yet. Not on Earth (witness the follies from the last DARPA Robotics Challenge), not in space. The world's best bipedal robots have trouble doing things like opening doors, climbing out of jeeps, and walking in straight lines. That's something NASA would like to fix, so it's given a pair of R5s—along with $500,000 USD each—to two US universities with awesome robotics teams.
NASA has high ambitions for the R5. "The first set of experiments we want to do are in lunar orbit or on lunar surface," says Steve Jurczyk, NASA's associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate. "These robots could tend the station when the crew isn't there, and they can help crew productivity and crew." Ultimately, the idea is that the robots could go to Mars to set up shop before humans get there.
Before that, though, the R5 needs to grow out of its clumsy phase—which is why NASA passed their droids off to the roboticists. "We aren't really focused on what the robots will be doing in space," says Taskin Padir at Northeastern University, one of the recipients of a shiny new R5. (The other one went to MIT.) "We will focus on things like perception, motion planning, human/robot interactions, and grasping objects." The challenges don't stop there, either. R5s need to be able to exit confined areas, stay balanced in rough terrain, walk down stairs, bend over, stand up, and pick themselves up if they fall. "Once we solve these hard problems from a robotics perspective, it's on NASA's turf to make them space ready," says Padir. That's when NASA swaps out all the hardware with 99.999 percent lighter parts and slaps on radiation shielding…"
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