NASA Astronaut Control Robots In Germany From Space Station

Space.com

While aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Jonny Kim controlled robots on a simulated martian landscape in Germany.  Credit:  European Space Agency (ESA) Footage: ESA/DLR

Transcript

00:00What if we told you that these robots are being controlled from space, 400 kilometers above Earth?

00:30From the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Johnny Kim is guiding a team of robots here on the ground.

00:40This is all part of an experiment called Surface Avatar, a collaboration between ESA and the German Aerospace Center .

00:51Its goal? To explore how astronauts can command robotic teams from space,

00:57giving us the tools to one day explore the Moon and Mars together.

01:04The first part of the experiment involved retrieving sample containers scattered across a simulated Martian landscape,

01:12built at DLR's facilities in Germany.

01:19ESA's four-legged robot Spot navigated the terrain autonomously, locating and collecting the samples.

01:27Music Plays

01:34At a handover station, Johnny took over.

02:03Supervising DLR's humanoid robot, Roland Justin, by selecting and combining high-level commands from a predefined set.

02:12He guided Justin through the steps needed to transfer the samples to a lander.

02:18In this kind of scenarios, we can control the robots as our avatars, either to remote-operated autonomous commands to execute certain tasks.

02:41Next came a simulated cave exploration.

02:46Issa's Interact rover transported a smaller robot dog, Bert, to the cave entrance.

02:53A boulder blocked the way.

02:55Johnny used Interact's robotic arm to remove the obstacle and placed Bert on the ground.

03:05But things didn't go smoothly on purpose.

03:08In a simulated malfunction, Bert detected one of its legs was damaged.

03:15Johnny had to retrain the robot dog's walking algorithm in real-time before it could continue into the cave.

03:22I think that obstacle has moved sufficiently for Bert to get in.

03:29Once fixed, Bert entered the cave and detected signs of ice, like we might find on Mars.

03:36These challenges are designed to test how astronauts respond when things don't go as planned.

03:43What was really important there is that the robot, it can still make mistakes during this complex task.

03:51Because it has to collect sample tubes, bring it somewhere else, navigate.

03:55And to make this entire task autonomous, it's really important that it can also recover from its own failures.

04:03And that it then can retry again.

04:07Behind the scenes, the team worked to ensure stable and secure communication between the robots on Earth and Johnny on the ISS.

04:16To really grab a big portion of the rock, so I kind of be strategic about what part of the rock I'm going to grab.

04:24The Surface Avatar experiment has advanced how humans and robots interact.

04:28We've made so many advances together, from working with a single robot, working with simpler modalities of commanding robots,

04:39to having much more complex robotic teams, as you can see here.

04:43And now, of course, the robots and the astronauts are separated by an orbiting spacecraft.

04:47But if you imagine in the future, the astronaut and the robot could actually go hand in hand and explore together,

04:54almost like a shepherd with its dog, so the astronaut could give voice commands.

04:59So we think through all of the scenarios and think that indeed humans and robots do well to explore together.

05:06all together.

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