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Astrobee: ISS Robotic Free Flyer

NASA Commentator Lori Meggs at the Marshall Space Flight Center talks to NASA Ames Research Center's Chris Provencher about SPHERES - an International Space Station robotics experiment platform used for multiple purposes. This spring marks a milestone for the project with ten years of operations. The small experimental satellites have been used for everything from autonomous rendezvous and docking to educational robotics competitions. Now, adding to that legacy is the next generation free-flyer called Astrobee, which is scheduled to fly in 2017. Astrobee will be a free-flying robot that can be remotely operated by astronauts in space or by mission controllers on the ground.

Topics:
Aerospace Automation RF & Microwave Electronics Robotics Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 it was 10 years ago today that spheres those bowling ball sized experimental satellites were first tested on orbit since then they've tested everything from rendezvous and docking to sloshing liquids to even student robotics competitions now to add to that legacy is the next generation robotic free flyer called astrobee set to fly to the station in 2017. i spoke with the

    00:00:26 project manager chris provencher at ames research center to get the buzz on the b master b is a free-flying robot that we're developing for inside the space station it's like a b like a b actually yes busy as a b and buzzing around like a b wow this this robot we have three main things that we want to accomplish with it

    00:00:47 the first is that we want it to be a free-flying camera inside the space station to help flight controllers and payload controllers on the ground have better situational awareness into what's happening inside the vehicle right now when they want to see inside the space station there are some camcorders set up but those are in fixed locations so this

    00:01:04 would really empower them to get the view that they want by being able to fly this robot around with an hd camera and to see what they need to see so what does it look like so is it like the sphere stuff or are we talking about something totally different uh it's it's about the size of spheres so spheres is is more rounded we're looking at something that's

    00:01:24 actually cube shape about 12 inches per side so right now we're still in the design phase we've identified all the capabilities that we wanted to have and we're working on a design to meet those capabilities and we've been doing prototyping along the way as well where'd the idea come from the idea is to really help with with

    00:01:44 humans uh on their missions so we're not developing a robot to perform robotic missions we want a robot that can help crews on their human exploration the most limiting resource is crew time and so the idea is to take over some of the tasks that the crew do to let them focus on science and experiments and the research and put over some of the more tedious tasks onto robots

    00:02:09 so in theory they could be performing an experiment and this little astro b could be over their shoulder filming what they're doing right exactly one of the things that we wanted to do is mobile sensor tasks on the space station right now the crew has to do a lot of things to survey the environment inside the space station to see if it's safe

    00:02:25 for example they have a sound level meter a handheld meter that they measure sound levels to make sure it's not getting too noisy and dangerous for their hearing so that's something that the robot could do they measure air quality to make sure that the co2 is getting scrubbed out of the out of the air properly so if we put that sensor on the robot that's another

    00:02:42 thing that the robot could do another example is we're working with a group on automated inventory management so there are thousands of pieces of equipment on the space station that have to be tracked and you have to know where it is um so right now we're working with a group to uh they're looking at putting smart tags on pieces of equipment and

    00:03:00 then having readers that can track where those pieces of equipment are and part of their solution is to have a free-flying robot with an rfid reader that can look for lost pieces of equipment so we're working with them on that as well you guys control it from the ground or how to control we do control it from the ground or can be controlled by the crew

    00:03:17 either way it's remotely controlled and one thing that we're trying to do is make this robot as autonomous as possible we don't want the crew to have to pull this robot out of a locker and set it up it kind of defeats the purpose so we want this thing to be able to fly around inside the space station without the crew having to supervise it to

    00:03:35 accomplish its tasks so as part of that that goal we are also building a dock so you know sometimes we call it the room buffer space right so we'll have a dock inside the space station where recharges its batteries and then is able to undock via remote control and perform the task all under the supervision of ground controllers and not having to interrupt the crew

    00:03:56 and this plays on a rich heritage from you guys at ames in the robotic capabilities yes so actually for the past few years we've been doing tests uh with spheres which is another free-floating object on space station we connected smartphones to it so that we could establish a link to the ground and we tested a remote control from the ground so yeah we do have some

    00:04:17 experience with this we've been working with with jpl on this project and we've also you know nasa has mechanisms for engaging small businesses so right now there are three small businesses that are working on developing appendages that would attach uh to the robot uh which is pretty neat and so we're also

    00:04:36 starting to do the same thing with academia have universities propose what they would attach to the robot when this project started one of the first things we had to do was name it and so we held a public competition to to name the robot and come up with a mission patch for it and it was really inspiring to see all the creative ideas that were submitted

    00:04:56 and that's how we got the name astro b because when we described what it would be like people thought of a bee buzzing around inside the space station staying busy so that's where the name astro b came from and it was just a really great reminder to to us about how cool our job really is