NASA's and Google Tango Smartphones Set To Launch New Robot Astronaut Into Space This Week.

First robots stole our jobs here on Earth — and now Google and NASA want to do the same to our astronauts. Later this week, Google and NASA will launch some Tango smartphone-powered SPHERES robots to the International Space Station. As their name suggests, SPHERES are spherical robots that will float through the halls of the ISS, powered by small CO2 thrusters, performing chores that would normally be carried out by astronauts. Tango, Google’s sensor-laden prototype depth-sensing smartphone, will be the brain of each robot. In the future, the SPHERES robots could even perform risky tasks outside the ISS in the deep, dark, never-ending expanse.

On July 11, an Orbital Sciences unmanned Cygnus spacecraft will launch atop an Antares rocket. Orbital Sciences, like SpaceX, has a commercial contract with NASA to ferry supplies to and from the ISS. Cygnus, like SpaceX’s Dragon, will carry a bunch of goodies for the astronauts aboard the ISS — including a handful of SPHERES.

In true science-loves-backronyms-a-bit-too-much style, SPHERES stands for Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites. As you can see in the photos throughout this story, each robot is about the size of a bowling ball, with two protrusions for a CO2 canister and the Tango smartphone. NASA has sent SPHERES to the ISS before, but all they could really do was move around with their small CO2 thruster. With the addition of a Tango “brain” the hope is that the robots will actually be able to assist astronauts on some tasks, or even completely carry out some mundane chores, freeing up astronauts to work on other things.

In recent years there has been a marked shift towards the use of off-the-shelf hardware in space (and military) applications. This is partly due to tighter budgets (a $1,000 digital camera is a damn sight cheaper than the tens-of-thousands you would spend on a bespoke camera), and partly because modern technology is just really darn good. “We wanted to add communication, a camera, increase the processing capability, accelerometers and other sensors [to the SPHERES]. As we were scratching our heads thinking about what to do, we realized the answer was in our hands,” Chris Provencher, SPHERES project manager told Reuters. “Let’s just use smartphones.”

 

Initially NASA’s SPHERES team just used normal smartphones from Best Buy, but they didn’t have the necessary capabilities to move around smoothly and unaided. Now, however, they’ve moved to Google’s Tango smartphone, which has a Kinect-like sensor on the back that can quickly and accurately create a 3D map of its surroundings. Google and NASA have already tested the smart, Tango-equipped SPHERES aboard a zero-g test flight — and now it’s time to actually ship three of them up to the ISS.
As these early SPHERES aren’t equipped with tools, they will mostly just fly around the ISS, testing out their software. The eventual goal is to have a fleet of bowling ball robots flying around in formation, fixing things, docking to things (and moving them around), and autonomously looking for things (a mislaid spanner, lost satellites, etc.) This would free up astronauts to do other, more important things — and if SPHERES can also perform EVAs (extra-vehicular activity, space walks), then the risk of being an astronaut would be significantly reduced.

Of course, in the long run, we run the risk of astronauts of eventually being entirely replaced by robots… but considering how long it would take to visit a nearby star, maybe that’s not such a bad thing, at least until all of the necessary terraforming has been carried out in advance of our grand colonization of space.