Do robots help humans in space?
Yes, robots have been helping humans in space for a long time. We’ve sent rovers to Mars and spacecraft to orbit other planets. Robots have even been helping astronauts on the International Space Station. One of the really cool things about robots is they can help humans do repetitive or even dangerous tasks.
With Artemis, NASA’s working to build a sustainable human presence on the Moon, and robots will be an important part of that. They will help build new structures, perform inspections, gather data from previously unexplored areas and perform science experiments to help us understand the environment.
And now we’re making even more advanced, intelligent and agile robots. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we’re working on a project called CADRE, short for Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration, to demonstrate a new technology of cooperative, multi-agent autonomy. CADRE is a network of shoe-box-sized mobile robots that will coordinate amongst each other to accomplish a goal, such as exploring or mapping an area.
Without a human controller in the loop, this technology will change the way we think about missions in the future and unlock immense opportunities. They could explore areas that are not easily accessible for humans, like lava tubes or icy caves or subsurface oceans in search of water and other minerals. And it would be okay even if a robot doesn’t make it back out because it would have shared its data with the rest of the team.
So do robots help humans in space? Yes. And at NASA we’re building a whole new fleet of robots that are going to help humans explore the Moon, Mars and beyond.
[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]