GITAI Partners With JAXA To Send Telepresence Robots To Space (ieee.org) 27
GITAI is a robotics startup with offices in Japan and the United States that's developing tech to put humanoid telepresence robots in space to take over for astronauts. IEEE: This week, GITAI is announcing a joint research agreement with JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) to see what it takes for robots to be useful in orbit, with the goal of substantially reducing the amount of money spent sending food and air up to those demanding humans on the International Space Station. It's also worth noting that GITAI has some new hires, including folks from the famous (and somewhat mysterious) Japanese bipedal robot company SCHAFT.
[...] GITAI says that their robots will "reduce the cost of space work to 10 percent" of the cost of using a real astronaut, by instead relying on earthbound humans for immersive teleoperation. As you might expect, the trouble with immersive teleoperation between Earth and orbit is getting data back and forth over a restrictive network. Part of GITAI's secret sauce involves compressing "data of 360-degree camera with resolution of 2.7K from original data volume of 800 Mbps to average 2.5 Mbps." At the same time, they've managed to reduce latency to 60 ms, which is really quite good, for talking to space. The plan is to get all of this working in low Earth orbit by 2020.
[...] GITAI says that their robots will "reduce the cost of space work to 10 percent" of the cost of using a real astronaut, by instead relying on earthbound humans for immersive teleoperation. As you might expect, the trouble with immersive teleoperation between Earth and orbit is getting data back and forth over a restrictive network. Part of GITAI's secret sauce involves compressing "data of 360-degree camera with resolution of 2.7K from original data volume of 800 Mbps to average 2.5 Mbps." At the same time, they've managed to reduce latency to 60 ms, which is really quite good, for talking to space. The plan is to get all of this working in low Earth orbit by 2020.
A simple compression operation (Score:2)
Where there is space, just send black (0), no need for Skippy the Wrench to see all the pretty stars.
Then for the rest of the scene, describe the object the camera is seeing in terms of lego blocks, which are small and render well into any object as Lego has demonstrated repeatedly via parks and video games.
Missing the point (Score:4, Interesting)
>with the goal of substantially reducing the amount of money spent sending food and air up to those demanding humans on the International Space Station.
I'm embarrassed to see that level of missing-the-point from IEEE Spectrum, even as a joke (I hope). Robotic telepresence has nothing to do with reducing the human presence on the ISS - the ISS exists primarily to develop the technologies to keep humans alive and healthy in space (discovering the biggest problems being step one in that process).
Telepresence robots are about allowing us to expand our capabilities far beyond the ISS without the costs and risks of subjecting all the necessary workers to the risks. Especially by allowing people to work remotely in the hazardous environments in space, rather than having to go EVA. Perhaps some of the workers will remote in from Earth, though with a round-trip lag that increases to more than 133 milliseconds between surface and low orbit (the time taken for a light to travel halfway around the Earth and back again), they will substantially increase reaction times, and thus be unsuitable for anything that requires any kind of fast reflexes. But that still leaves a *lot* of jobs that could be done remotely, if slightly awkwardly. With practice you could probably compensate for the extra ~1/8th of a second of lag fairly well, especially if lag was artificially added so that it remained constant at the worst-case situation, rather than constantly changing.
They're hardly limited to orbital applications either - the moon would introduce a minimum of 2.6 seconds of lag for Earth-based operators, which would probably be too much to manually compensate for with anything that involves any reflexes - but you might be able to develop "AI reflexes" that can anticipate your intentions well enough for most situations. Or, you just have the operators safely inside a lunar habitat while they work remotely on the surface without worrying about radiation, oxygen, etc. Save the EVAs for recreation and especially difficult problems (though it seems to me that a good telepresence robot should be at least as dexterous as a person wearing bulky vacuum/radiation gloves.)
And of course, there's no reason a telepresence robot has to be bound by human limitations. A 10m tall robot torso with its "eyes" 60 cm apart would let an operator do large-scale assembly at an apparent 1/10th scale, without the awkwardness normally associated with operating banks of levers, etc. to control the dozens of degrees of freedom available.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not even remotely. They're teleoperated, but telepresence allows you to "be there", interacting with the remote location using a robotic proxy, often via a VR interface (as appears to be the case here). That's not remotely possible with the lag involved beyond Earth orbit.
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose for clarity I should say: ...interacting with the remote location in real time using a robotic proxy...
Re: (Score:2)
The stress of spacewalks in likely also a major consideration. Spacesuits are not easy to work in and are very uncomfortable. Astronauts do spacewalks because they're astronauts, not because spacewalks are easy or comfortable. There's also a hard limit on a suit's endurance, there's a limited amount of air, temperature control, and power available. For reference here's a list of all the ISS spacewalks [nasa.gov], the longest was almost nine hours with the majority between six and eight hours. You'll notice that 214 sp
Re: (Score:2)
Quite so.
Now think construction, mining, refining,etc. - all the things that will need to be done routinely, as somebody's go-to-work-every-morning day job, if we're going to actually colonize space instead of just having a few off-planet laboratories.
Lots of people talk about having autonomous robots to do all that for us, and I'm sure someday we will, but probably not for a very long time - by all appearances the AI required to handle that is still a long way off. We've made great strides on robotic bodi
Re: (Score:3)
Why protect those, who want the risk. Reality is the core stuff should be the focus, life support, better space drives, sturdier hulls. There are literally millions of people who very much want to take that risk.
Re: (Score:2)
Most people aren't in it for the risk, that's just the price of admission. And if you can dramatically lower the risk by making robotic-EVAs a perfectly viable alternative for most things, instead of a dangerous, unpleasant, in-person ordeal, then you greatly increase the amount you accomplish with a given amount of manpower.
You still need people on-location, facing the unavoidable risks that come with that. But they don't have to be outside on a regular basis, doing all the dangerous construction, mainte
Re: (Score:3)
We can't. Ever. Not really. Not without rewriting the laws of physics. 1.3 light-seconds away means 2.6 seconds of unavoidable lag. You might be able to operate a "Diablo style" point-and-click RPG style interface serviceably with that kind of lag, micro-managing a limited-intelligence robot, but it will always be woefully inadequate for a "First Person" VR experience.
Not necessarily completely unserviceable, especially with 360* VR recording so that you can at least look around in "real time" (though 1.
The space station was never about science (Score:2)
It was always, specifically, about putting humans in space. Just because it is there. Much like climbing a mountain.
Of course everything now done by astronauts could be done by robots for much less cost. Ordinary people/taxpayers cannot understand science, but they can understand humans in space.
(Personally I would rather they spend the money on science rather than humans in space. The MIR was a great space experiment, humans in space for an extended period. But that was long ago and done.)
Re: (Score:3)
Actually it is about science - but the real science is mostly studying the hazards of living in space, and how to mitigate them. The astronauts are highly-competent lab rats - the additional science they perform themselves is mostly just icing on the cake.
And we're not doing that "just because it's there", but because space offers an *enormous* font of wealth and opportunity, and the only possible place our species can survive in the long term. But first we have to develop the technology to survive there.
Re: (Score:2)
Robots operating in a complex natural environment are going to be a lot more useful with a real-time human operator, than they are under the control of a feeble AI (and there's no evidence that non-feeble AIs are anywhere in the near future). And that means you have to have people living and working out there, without a half-hour or more of unavoidable speed-of-light lag.
Maybe it's just a small team of body-hopping telepresence "cyborgs" that handle the problems, with an army of autonomous robots at their
Galileo was Right (Score:1)