These NASA robots are heading to the International Space Station

Inside NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is a test environment that simulates the International Space Station's pressurized capsules. Here, aerospace engineers test the new Astrobee intra vehicular activity (IVA) robots, which will be heading to the ISS in the spring.

These robots are 1-by-1-foot cubes, with an array of LED communication lights. They can function autonomously or be remotely controlled from Houston. While on the ISS, Astrobees will carry out routine maintenance tasks, like checking inventory with an RFID scanner and using a sensor-array to record air quality levels, CO2, and radiation. Their HD cameras will also function as the eyes and ears for ground control; right now, astronauts have to wield camcorders up there to show Houston what's going on.

This is a return visit to NASA Ames for PCMag. We came last year to meet Maria Bualat, deputy head of the agency's Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG). Back then, we learned about the K10/KREX rovers, walked on the mocked-up Mars surface they use to test rovers, and saw the SPHERES (Synchronised Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites), which were used for over a decade, and then modified into robots to carry out maintenance tasks under instruction from astronauts and/or ground control.

At the time, Bualat showed us a very early prototype of the autonomous Astrobee robot, and NASA invited us to return when they were further down the engineering path. So recently, we came back to interview Dr. Trey Smith, Astrobee Lead Engineer, who started working on NASA projects as a student in 1998, and joined NASA's Intelligent Robotics Group full-time in 2007.

Just as the BB-9E, BB-8, C-3PO, and R2-D2 droids assisted personnel in the fictional Rebel Alliance, Astrobee robots have been engineered to improve 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 pointed out. "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."

The Astrobee team member running these human-robot interaction experiments is Dr. Yunkyung Kim. She joined NASA last year from Samsung, after receiving her doctorate from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), home of the Hubo robot we saw win the DARPA challenge 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," confirmed Dr. 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 provided by lithium-ion batteries, which, depending on the tasks, will last several hours in operational mode, before self-docking and recharging is required. The Astrobee's computational systems are in a triple processing layer, utilizing Android for high-level operations and Linux for the rest. Even NASA is subject to fluctuations in supply and demand within the electronics industry.

"When you have a three-year project, you can run into obsolescence with suppliers," Dr. Smith pointed out. "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."

Tech Support in Space

ISS software updates will be tricky. The space station doesn't have Wi-Fi, but it does have internet connectivity via NASA's TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellites), an array of nine geosynchronous satellites that provide approximately 50Mbit of bandwidth.

"Software updates are pushed very carefully," said Dr. 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 deployed, there will be three Astrobee robots on the ISS, three on the ground and four 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."

Astrobee robots are designed to remain active for the life of the ISS, which is currently scheduled to end in 2024. "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 said.

As for post-2024, Dr. Smith is coy, as NASA hasn't publicly revealed Astrobee's next mission.

"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 concept of autonomous robots seeking intelligent life in inhospitable places was the focus of Dr. 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," said Dr. Smith. "When I was doing my PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon, I based my thesis on the Life in the Atacama project, an extreme environment which is used to do analogous planetary exploration studies.

"Simply put, during that project, we achieved what was arguably the first time a robot autonomously discovered life in an extreme environment," he said.

So there you have it: by June 2018, Astrobee will be on the ISS working alongside human astronaut crews. Post-2024, later iterations of the free-flying smart robots could be heading where no robot has gone before, in search of life and helping to establish off-world colonies.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.