Robotic Nation Evidence

There are several NASA robotics projects getting recycled into the news feed right now because of all of the discussion about the Hubble repair robot.

For example, the NASA info droid was announced as early as July 2001 and is now being discussed again in this Wired story because it is just about ready for deployment. From the article:

The Personal Satellite Assistant is a robot prototype designed to buzz around the space station, performing a variety of jobs for astronauts and mission controllers: monitoring life-support systems, keeping tabs on the day's tasks and reminding space scientists how to do their experiments right.

After six years of development, engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center say they now have a version of the Personal Satellite Assistant, or PSA, that's fully mobile, with a sensor suite that's nearly space-ready.

But it's unclear whether the red spherical bot will ever make it into orbit. Like so much else at the space agency these days, the fate of the PSA remains uncertain. The drone's makers hope to have an answer from the higher-ups by the end of the summer.

See also this page.

Of course, you don't really need to provide astronauts with PSAs if all the astronauts have been replaced by robots. The Hubble repair robot is a great example of that trend. So is NASA's Robonaut.



NASA offers this page summarizing the Robonaut idea:

Robonaut is a humanoid robot designed by the Robot Systems Technology Branch at NASA's Johnson Space Center in a collaborative effort with DARPA. The Robonaut project seeks to develop and demonstrate a robotic system that can function as an EVA astronaut equivalent.

An "astronaut equivalent" is, of course, an "astronaut replacement". Imagine how much simpler, smaller and lighter the space shuttle or the space station would be if it did not need to house human astronauts or provide them with life support. See Robotic Nation for details.