From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On Episode 230, Aric Katterhagen discusses free-flying robots on the space station that are training to help astronauts with their daily lives. This episode was recorded on January 11, 2022.
Transcript
Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 230, “Abuzz on Station.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. You’re a listener of this podcast, so you know: humans are living and working in space, and they have been, continuously, for more than 21 years. And if you haven’t heard, we’re planning to continue that through at least 2030 and then beyond on commercial destinations. Not to mention on and around the Moon through NASA’s Artemis program. So, we’re planning to have humans working and living in space for quite some time, and they might need some extra helping hands in the form of, say, a flying robot. Luckily, we have experiments on station looking at just that. Enter the Astrobee, a cubed-shaped robot that flies around the station. This capability of a flying robot on station is very versatile, so investigators with interesting ideas can add to this ever-evolving capability. To help us understand Astrobee, its capabilities, and its evolution, we’re bringing in Aric Katterhagen, SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites) and Astrobee Operations Lead over at Ames Research Center. Aric has an undergraduate degree from St. John’s University in natural sciences with a focus in biochemistry, as well as a masters in space studies from the University of North Dakota’s John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences, as well as an MBA from the University of Phoenix. At NASA, he’s worked as a research scientist on the Space Station Biological Research Project, and a biomedical engineer focused on space station biomedical sensors, research, and development. In addition to his decade at NASA, he was an officer in the Air Force in the medical and logistics office. So, let’s learn what’s abuzz with these flying robots in space. Enjoy.
[ Music]
Host: Aric Katterhagen, thanks so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast.
Aric Katterhagen: Thank you. I’m honored to be part of this program. I’ve been consuming your episodes that I’ve missed in the past and become a big fan of what you’re doing, and what you and your team are doing is essential to our whole mission at NASA and educating the public. So, thank you for what you do, and your team, and I’m really excited to be here and talk about robots in space today.
Host: Awesome. Well, I appreciate that, Aric, and of course, I am, I am very interested in what you do. Flying robots in space, it sounds like a pretty cool job. So, that’s what we’re going to get into today. You are operations lead for Astrobee, and before that you were with SPHERES, which are these flying robots. Well, first, describe, you know, your role, what exactly that means, operations lead, and then even the story of how you got there.
Aric Katterhagen: As the operations lead in short summary of my job is to make sure that when we perform our science with the Astrobee robots on the space station that everything is in place when we show up and we get on that stage, so to speak, with the astronauts. The most valuable resource on the space station, as we all probably know, is human time, the astronaut time, and when the astronauts show up to operate our hardware, my job is to make sure that everything is in place when that happens. So, there’s planning, months — even a year –months, a week ahead of time, leading up until that day, until that moment. And there’s planning products that we put in place, procedures that we write, I need to make sure that all the resources on the space station are in place, the cameras, and of course there’s a whole team of people that help do that. The team at NASA Ames, where I work, people in Huntsville, people in Houston, and any time the astronaut show up to do our work we just need to make sure everything is in place, and then as the astronauts are operating our hardware, my job is to communicate with them and help them troubleshoot or answer questions and keep things moving efficiently. So I’m the in-between between the crew and then our ground team, communicating on both sides and making sure we get as much done as we can in that time that we have to do that. And even if the astronauts are not there, and we’re operating our robots remotely without the crew present, there’s still all that planning, the stuff that needs to be put in place. So, in a short summary, that’s what I do.
Host: Yeah, you’re making all the pieces, you’re putting all the pieces in the right places so that when it’s time to actually execute the operation, it flows, and everybody is there doing what they’re supposed to do, and it’s working how it’s supposed to work. I wonder how you got there from, when I went over your history and the introduction, you had a lot of biomedical experience. So, how’d you transition from there to being an operations lead for flying robots?
Aric Katterhagen: I think my role is, my role on the team is a little unique, and my background for the team is unique, as you said. When it comes to this robotics world, I definitely feel like a fish out of water at times, and, but that’s also exciting because I am constantly learning. I do come from a biomedical and a life science background, and this robotics programming world is really foreign to me, but it’s exciting and I really like it. I started at NASA Ames in life science, more human-type research, and then I left, came back, and I was assisting the prior operations lead for SPHERES. You’re familiar with the robot SPHERES that we had on the space station, which Astrobee has evolved from. And I was assisting that operations lead, and that person decided to move onto another project, and I had a little bit of knowledge at that point and just jumped in and built from there. So, what really makes me able to do what I do with having a different background is the incredible team that I work with. I just, I work with some brilliant people who I’m constantly learning from and are very supportive, and it’s a lot of fun.
Host: It sounds like it.
Aric Katterhagen: It’s a unique role.
Host: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, let’s dive into exactly what these are, and you mentioned SPHERES, and that’s sort of what kicked you off in this role, taking over that lead role with something called SPHERES. Let’s start there. What is SPHERES?
Aric Katterhagen: SPHERES is, I think, the longest-lasting, without a doubt probably the coolest, next to Astrobee, research project that was on the space station. We operated SPHERES for 13 years. And SPHERES, as the word is sphere like a circle, it’s also, typical NASA, a long acronym for a project called Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient Experimental Satellite. I think I got that right. And it was a project that evolved out of MIT in Boston, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, of course, one of the premier engineering schools in the nation. And they started this project, and they wanted to have these free-flying robots on the space station. And fast forward, it grew so much that NASA Ames took it over from an operations perspective because as a university, they were performing the research and maintaining these robots and operating them. And they handed it over to NASA Ames from an operations perspective so that they could continue developing research, which they continued to do for the next, the whole 13 years. And that’s how the project came to NASA Ames, and then as that was winding down we started building Astrobee in the background to replace the SPHERES. And SPHERES, like I said, 13 years, over 160 test sessions, just an amazing, amazing project.
Host: See, I think this is an important distinction on just exactly what SPHERES and Astrobee are, because it is a little bit different. You talked about operations and how that’s different from the research. How I’m trying to imagine it, from a research perspective, from a what this thing is and does on station is, I’m thinking of it, and correct me if I’m wrong, I’m thinking of SPHERES and Astrobee as the facility. So, you, as the operations lead are making the facility run. You’re making that work. The research is what you put onto that facility, and whatever that may be, whether it’s a code or a navigation software or some unique capability that has to run in that facility, and that’s, that’s, when you’re making that distinction between the operations and research, that’s what’s going through my mind. Am I getting this right?
Aric Katterhagen: Yeah, very insightful question. So, you hit on something important. The hardware and everything, the hardware, the software, that is on the space station and on the ground is we consider as part of this research facility, and we, we run that from NASA Ames. We have the ops team, which I’m head of, and then we have an engineering team, and we all work very closely together. I consider us one big operations engineering team. It’s just an incredible team. And we run that hardware and make sure that it is ready to go so that researchers can do the research, like you said. And the research that can be done on these robots is a spectrum that is just incredible, and that can be a whole podcast in and of itself, and we can touch on some of it, but it’s just incredible concepts that would, anything that anybody can think of to attach to these robots or run from a software perspective, they can apply and attempt to do, and our team is there to support that with our hardware; the facility, as you said. And we, even our own team does research, of course, with our hardware, but the goal is to have this research facility, these robots, available for other people, students, researchers, companies to use.
Host: So, you saw a lot of these, you know, and I think was the metric like 160 or something over 13 years that were conducted specifically on SPHERES, so that’s a lot, and you were the operations lead for many of those, for sure. Just to add some context for our listeners, if you were to, you know, what are some of your, I hate to say the word “favorite” but I’ll use it, what were some of your favorite experiments, maybe like two or three, that took place on SPHERES, just to help our listeners understand, just what this thing can do?
Aric Katterhagen: Yeah, there are some that come to mind. They’re all really exciting, and what I really like about this project and my job is that not only are the robots themselves a research platform that we are continually learning about and learning how to operate more efficiently and better, and the information that goes into just learning that I am constantly learning. But then these researchers come along with these cool ideas that they attach to our hardware, and those research projects in and of themselves become a whole other area of research that I get to learn about. So to answer your question, we have done stuff from fluid dynamics, where we have attached these large containers with fluid in them that we move around and study liquid dynamics, a project called Slosh, just like the word slosh of a liquid in a container. Slosh is still to this day a very important area of research for rockets when they launch and they have liquid fuel, and that fuel sloshes around. To this day, we still don’t fully understand how to contain that, and there’s a lot of inefficiencies still with liquid propellant. And we’ve done extended research on SPHERES and probably Astrobee coming up in the future of Slosh experiments. That was a really fun one, because it was exciting to watch the liquid, and the astronauts loved it. Another one that I’ll highlight is a project called Zero Robotics, you may have heard of, but that was also an MIT project, and what was really cool about Zero Robotics it was a project that had allowed students, grade school students and high school students, we ran it twice a year, to program robots. And we had this competition, this Zero Robotics project would culminate with this on-orbit live student competition with the astronauts. It was highly choreographed. So normally our test sessions we run are just our team with the astronaut, and we can make mistakes, and we just move forward. But this Zero Robotics project was a live event with the students receiving video from the space station. They get to see the Astrobees and the SPHERES maneuver and, very exciting. There was this round-robin tournament, live, exciting, that was probably my favorite.
Host: I remember those. We used to do, we used to do this show a while ago, it was a couple years ago, called “Space Station Live.” It was like a 30-minute program that we did every day of the week to just tell, you know, our viewers what was happening on the station that day. And you know, I think one of the more exciting ones, whenever it was happening, which to me was pretty frequent, it seemed like it was happening all the time, was the Zero Robotics competition. I remember, like, astronauts being in the Japanese laboratory and you were seeing robots, these robots fly around the station, and we were getting fantastic camera views because you were mentioning that it was an event, so we got to see, we got to see it, and it was for, for that particular show, you know, I remember being excited when I was on that week and had to write about Zero Robotics because it was exciting to see, and then, you know that there was something going on, there was students on the ground actually, you know, they designed, I think the idea was they coded something, and they saw their code live happening in space. So, it was interactive, it was meaningful, you know, it seemed like a really cool thing.
Aric Katterhagen: It was really, it’s really thrilling, and what happens in the background during those events is, what other people don’t see is amazing, because we have our teams at NASA Ames; the MIT team is in Boston with an auditorium full of students that had the option to travel to MIT when they were participating, and then the schools who couldn’t travel, they were, you know, in their gymnasiums gathered. But we would have astronauts visiting MIT, talking to the students. There’s just a huge choreograph going on in the background. But all anybody saw was the astronauts and the robots, which were most important. It just was really exciting. It was really exciting.
Host: Yeah, looking forward to that.
Aric Katterhagen: I’m looking forward to more of that with Astrobee.
Host: Oh, yeah, we’ll definitely get into that too. Before we do though, I got one more on SPHERES, and I think this is an important one that will help us transition to Astrobee. We’re talking about these robots, I think you described the shape as, you know, spherical in nature, and all these different things they can do; how did it work? Whenever you put the robot in space, how did it fly around?
Aric Katterhagen: This is also interesting because this is something that most people ask is, you see these robots, and they’re floating, they’re moving and they’re floating. It’s microgravity, but for people who aren’t familiar with it, it’s hard to conceptualize. And when you’re flying robots in that environment there are different ways that you can maneuver them. They’re not walking on the ground like on Earth, of course, and they’re not sliding across any rails. They are floating and flying around, and with SPHERES the way we did that is we had these carbon dioxide, compressed carbon dioxide tanks that we would screw into this round, sphere satellite — which actually wasn’t a sphere, it had 18 sides to it, but it looked like a sphere; it was more or less a sphere. And we would screw in these carbon dioxide tanks. These are the same tanks more or less that we used with the paintball guns, same concept…
Host: Oh, yeah.
Aric Katterhagen:…and the carbon dioxide would shoot out. There was 12 nozzles, 12 thrusters, strategically placed around the sphere. And the hardware would, depending on where we would want to tell the Astrobee or the sphere to move from point A to point B, it would shoot out these little spurts of carbon dioxide that would propel it. You know, for every action there’s a reaction, it’s a perfect example of Newtonian physics, right, is you shoot out this carbon dioxide and the satellite goes in the opposite direction. So, that’s, it maneuvered that way, and it communicated with these beacons. It didn’t have any eyes like Astrobee, so it would shoot out this, little spurts of gas to move around, and then it would communicate with these beacons through ultrasound and infrared pinging back and forth so that we could know exactly where it was in that 3D volume. The goal of Astrobee was to continue that research platform of SPHERES but not have what we call consumables. And the main consumables of the SPHERES robots were the carbon dioxide tanks, which interestingly we refurbished, we flew them back and forth — whenever they were empty they returned, we filled them back up, tested them, and then flew them back to the ISS, to the space station. And the other consumable, so, there was the carbon dioxide, the other consumable were batteries. We had these disposable batteries that we custom-built, at NASA Ames, and we would fly them to the space station, and when they were consumed, they were tossed. And there’s a lot of resources there, as you can imagine. So, the goal of Astrobee was to continue what the SPHERES project was doing but not have these consumables. So, what we did is we removed that carbon dioxide system, no gas, and we, it’s all fan driven. So, the Astrobees used the ambient air of the space station, it pulls air in on these two modules on the side, and it lightly compresses that, and then it sort of shoots out that air through six nozzles on each side, so 12 total. So, just like SPHERES had 12 thrusters, Astrobee also has these 12 fan thrusters, but instead of gas it’s a little bit of compressed air. So, it’s all fan driven, and the batteries are rechargeable on Astrobee. So, we removed those consumables.
Host: Awesome, all right. So, that’s, that’s a perfect transition, right, getting from SPHERES into Astrobee. The next generation stuff is to increase the efficiency drastically. We talked about fans, we talked about the rechargeable. You also mentioned eyes, Astrobee has eyes?
Aric Katterhagen: Yes, it has a touch screen display on it, but I should clarify, the eyes that, if you’ve ever seen Astrobee, it has this touch screen on the front that has these very friendly-looking eyes that are blinking, moving left to right. It’s really neat to see. Those eyes, that display currently, is doing nothing. It’s a display more or less of a visual of, hey, this is the front of Astrobee. There’s no current indication of those eyes doing anything. And those eyes don’t have the ability to see like our normal eyes, and I’ll describe in a moment how Astrobee does see. There are software updates that need to be done for those eyes to mean anything and do anything, and that could be a research project in and of itself. You know, for example, somebody could program those eyes, when the eyes are looking left, Astrobee is going left; that’s a potential thing. That’s currently nothing that we’re doing, the eyes are more right now just an aesthetic. But when I was talking about SPHERES not having eyes, there was no cameras on SPHERES, there was no way for SPHERES to see where it is in its environment other than talking to these beacons through ultrasound and infrared. A goal of Astrobee was to change that so Astrobee could see where it is, and how it does that is through a navigation camera that it has on the front. Astrobee has six cameras that do different things all around it. And there are three cameras on the front, and one of them is a navigation camera. And what Astrobee does, it’s a vision-based navigation platform, so this navigation camera looks around, and it sees objects in the space station. And through recognizing those objects, it understands where it is in its environment. So, what we are constantly doing every time we fly Astrobee is we’re collecting, mapping, what we call mapping data, and we have an amazing software team on the ground that compiles that, and they build this map. So, the cameras on Astrobee sees where it is, it compares those objects to its current map, and it says, OK, here I am. It’s similar to if you were to walk through your house, kind of a bad analogy, but if you were to walk through your house blindfolded and touching things that you know where they are, you could navigate, you know, through your house or your office. Now, if somebody came in and moved all of those objects around, and then they blindfolded you and you started to feel your way around, you’d be lost. Now, it’s not a great comparison because we’re not blindfolding Astrobee and Astrobee is not feeling, but it’s seeing these objects and knowing where it is. Now, if those objects get moved in the space station, that becomes a challenge. So the eyes are this navigation camera on Astrobee, if that makes some sense.
Host: Yeah, it does, and it sounds like there’s a little bit of components, remember when we were having that conversation about the hardware and the operations versus the research, it sounds like this is a little bit of both, right? The design of Astrobee is to navigate, and that’s the operation, so you can put research on it, and it can navigate. But it sounds like this is a new capability, and it sounds like you guys are researching that and trying to, you know, better understand navigation in these free-flying robots. So, it sounds like it’s sort of a hybrid to those two things.
Aric Katterhagen: Yeah, definitely. And another big difference between SPHERES and Astrobee is that SPHERES was strictly a research platform, and it needed to always be what we would say crew-attended, there needed to be crew present, and it was research only, which is a good thing. The goal of Astrobee is to do that as well, but also take the next jump into being this crew-assisted vehicle, being like a crew member on a space station, starting to perform jobs that are, help the astronauts with their daily lives. So we’re going from a research platform to this actual robot that will do these things on the space station that can help the astronauts improve their daily life. So, it’s a whole other level of capability, which is very important for long-duration spaceflight, you know, the Gateway project, Artemis project. There’s things that we’re doing now with Astrobee that is looking at that future, of having that robot on the space station.
Host: That is awesome. You need a chef mode, Aric, where they cook the meal and then bring it to the astronaut who is working on an experiment. That would be cool.
Aric Katterhagen: I’ve joked with some of the crew members of, hey, what would you like Astrobee to do for you in the future? And you know, one of them said, hey, bring me a cup of coffee. You know, and it’s not impossible. It’s not impossible. We got some more things to do to make that happen, but you know what, and on that note, I think what is really great for people who are not familiar with this or even if they are, what was really exciting about these free-flying robots, especially Astrobee and going into that evolution that we just talked about is, now that imagination that we’ve always had in our heads as kids, adults, of these robots in space is becoming a reality, and Astrobee is making that happen. You know, think of whatever your favorite science fiction movie is, and whatever that robotic sidekick is in that movie — there’s usually one — that’s what Astrobee is, and it’s a reality, it’s no longer in our imagination. So, it’s really exciting.
Host: And it’s happening right now, that is exciting.
Aric Katterhagen: Mm-hmm.
Host: Very, very awesome. In terms of, before we move on to maybe some of the operations and what you guys are doing down in the control room to actually make this thing work every time you do a run, there is some visual difference between SPHERES and Astrobee. You mentioned SPHERES being mostly spherical but had some angles to it, right? So, it’s, I think you said, like [18] sides or something. What about Astrobee? What does that look like?
Aric Katterhagen: Astrobee is, I describe Astrobee in simple terms as a square box, which doesn’t sound very exciting, right, but if you look at it, that’s what it is. It’s a square, it’s a 30 centimeters square, which is approximately, I think 11.8 inches, let’s just call it 12 inches. So, to give a perspective for the listeners, is just picture a box, 12 inches square. That’s the size of Astrobee. SPHERES could fit inside of that. I think SPHERES was maybe 60%, 70% that size in diameter. So, it’s a little bit bigger, and there’s a reason for that, that square design was driven largely, mostly, by this fan, this desire to have a fan-driven system. And that’s a fascinating, that evolution, the models that we went through to get where we’re at, was really, there’s videos we have on our website of that evolution. And having, needing a system where it draws in air from the sides, lightly compresses it, and then pushes that air through these nozzles I mentioned, is the design to that box. So, there’s two propeller modules on the sides that can be taken off and replaced if needed. And then there’s a center, smaller area, the cube where the processors are and the cargo bays and really the brains, the main part of the body. So, it’s, the design, the shape is driven by that need, going back to our conversation, to not have consumables, have a fan-driven system. And when you look at it, it’s really pretty cool, and we got an arm that attaches to it that comes out of it, and it really comes to life with those eyes and, yeah so what goes from a square box is really pretty cool.
Host: What’s good about a square that gives you, you know, you said you went through — not a square, a cube — that gives you what you need versus a lot of the other shapes that you were considering in the design, what’s good about that particular shape that, you know, makes Astrobee work exactly how you’re describing the way you want to?
Aric Katterhagen: Yeah. It’s really having that fan that bring, having a fan, a circular fan draw in the air, and that air is drawn into an area we call a plenum that just is this area where the air is compressed. So, really having that, that circular fan inside of a protective case, and then also having the nozzles strategically placed on the flat surfaces around the cube. You know, you could probably make it a little bit more rounded, but then the manufacturing gets more complicated. And we also wanted to have this cube that had these cargo bays. There’s three cargo bays, which we can attach the guest science hardware to. And we wanted to have an area on the top where the arm, we wanted to design an arm which we designed at NASA Ames as part of the original design in the project of Astrobee, and that all fits into a nice cube shape. And from a manufacturing point of view — and then also there’s a whole area of acoustics: that’s a whole conversation in and of itself, is we had to design this to be at a certain acoustic level. Everything that flies up to the space station has to meet all these requirements, as I’m sure you’re aware of, whether it’s acoustics or display requirements, and the acoustics of these fans were also what largely drove the shape.
Host: OK, makes it a little quieter, right? You can’t have too many noisy things on station. OK.
Aric Katterhagen: Exactly.
Host: Very good. All right. So, we got an understanding of SPHERES and Astrobee, what they look like, kind of how they how work. Let’s take us through a run. Let’s take the example that Astrobee is scheduled for the day to be operated, and it’s going to do, it’s going to fly around station for a bit. So, what does it look like on orbit? What are the astronauts doing? What are you doing? What is your team doing? How does the communication and operation work? Take us through, take us through a day.
Aric Katterhagen: Yeah, so leading up to that, as I mentioned earlier, is all this planning, but when all that planning is in place and we show up, well, I’ll even step back: I think what is a good perspective if people don’t understand how the space station operates, is the astronauts are on a 24-hour schedule, just like us on the ground. They’re operating on, you know, the UTC, Universal Time, which is Greenwich time, you know, zero hour on the clock every day. And then there’s all these time zones, these 24-hour time zones around the clock, right? And like right in Central Time Zone we’re six hours, I think, right now with the Daylight Savings Time, behind the astronauts; in California we’re eight hours behind. So, when the astronauts wake up at 8:00 o’clock in the morning, it’s midnight that night before for us in California. And we show up at that time, so we’re sleep-shifting. We’re working through the night, literally, and we show up and we have a bunch of commanding and preparation that we need to do beforehand. When we get that time on the astronauts’ schedule, whether it’s 30 minutes or its five hours, we need to make sure everything is in place on the robots and the robots are ready to go at that time when the crew shows up. And there is usually several hours of commanding that we do before, and our amazing ground and engineering and software team is talking to the robots, updating software, making sure that they are communicating to the ground, our ground control stations properly, there’s all this preparation that we do ahead of time to make sure that when that stage appears of us getting ready to fly the Astrobees ourselves or for the crew to do something with the hardware that we’re ready. So, we normally operate out of this really cool room at NASA Ames, our operations room, with all these great, you know, computers and screens and monitors on the wall. That’s changed a little bit with the current situation of working remotely, but, yeah, when we show up, there is all the stuff that needs to be in place. I don’t know if that answers the question or not, but —
Host: Yeah, yeah. It sounds, well, it sounds like first of all you got to get there early, which is, you know, props to your team, really, because you have to, you know, you’re dedicated to getting the job done and getting it done when it needs to be done to fit the astronauts’ schedule. So, you’re really, what it sounds like is you are there to really just make sure all the different components that we were going over before, the fans, the navigation equipment, the batteries, you know, everything looks good so that when Astrobee is ready to do what it’s ready to do that it, that you, you know, that is ready for the astronaut and that there’s no impact to the schedule. Is there any troubleshooting steps that your team can do should a fan not work, or should the battery be lower than you were expecting it to? Do you have those steps that you can guide an astronaut through to make sure Astrobee is ready?
Aric Katterhagen: There are. We have a whole triage tree that we use for all scenarios, and as we continue to do ops new things come up, and then we, we learn that, OK, we need to prepare for this. And usually what will happen is the Astrobee, so there’s three Astrobees that we flew to the space station, and they have fun names. There’s Queen Bee, Honey Bee, and Bumble Bee; they all have these names that the astronauts call them by. They are all color coded appropriately, but they all look the same. They have different names and depending on which Astrobees we are using that day, we will have directions for the crew when they start their day typically to go turn on that specific Astrobee. Usually, it’s both Astrobees that are deployed. They’re on, there’s a docking station on the wall in the Japanese module, and they will go turn them on for us, and then we can talk to them from the ground. The astronauts will go off, do whatever they do that next part of their day, and then we are talking to the robots, checking the batteries, making sure everything is functioning like you’re asking, and if something is not looking good there are a series of things that we will do on the ground to find out if that problem is something on our end, if it’s a connection issue, sometimes we have to have the astronauts do a real-time call to, you know, to the flight director and say, hey, we get permission the go have the astronaut come back and power-cycle the dock, power-cycle the Astrobee, get it back online, and hopefully it’s nothing severe, but most cases the Astrobee is ready to do.
Host: I see, OK. And this is part of what you were describing earlier in our conversation, that Astrobee doesn’t need as much monitoring as SPHERES. So, they can do exactly that. You turn it on, you guys do your checks, and they’re off going to do the next thing. Does an astronaut need to, or I mean, I guess, can they watch one of your runs, or is it truly not required, that you can do whatever you need to do without astronaut oversight?
Aric Katterhagen: This is a very important question because this distinguishes the biggest difference, going back to SPHERES again and Astrobee, and what Astrobee is meant to do. The whole goal of Astrobee in a perfect scenario is to be completely autonomous, meaning that we can operate it from the ground and crew does not need to do anything. Now, aside from a few small things, like I said, of turning them physically on, if the Astrobees are put into hibernation mode, which we can do from the ground, we can wake them up from the ground. But if Astrobees are physically turned off, which we usually have them do at the end of an experiment or a test session — every time we do these experiments I call them test sessions, so if I say test session, that’s what I’m referred to — at the end of these test sessions, depending when the next test session is, we typically will have the astronauts power off the Astrobees once we download our data, just to save the hardware and the batteries. So, anyway, once the astronauts turn them on, the goal is for them to not have to do anything, and we can fly the Astrobees off of the dock and fly them around and do whatever research that we’re planning to do that day. Now, the caveat to that would be, of course, if we need to attach hardware to the Astrobees, guest science hardware, other experiment hardware, the arm that I mentioned for Astrobee comes off of Astrobee, that we can replace the arms with another arm or with another piece of hardware, of course the astronauts need to physically go do that. And those are activities that are relatively short. So, aside from the astronauts needing to power on, power off, and attach things, the goal is for Astrobee to be fully autonomous. Now, there are experiments that we do that require the astronauts to be there and position the Astrobees in specific places, and then we will do formation flights with the Astrobees, we will do other experiments; we’ve done experiments already where we’ve got the Astrobees coming together with like Gecko materials and touching each other, and we need the astronauts there to help either pull them apart or position them. So, we’re still in a place where we are doing experiments with the astronauts, but we eventually want to be able to do things that minimize their time. And that’s going back to our whole conversation of long-duration spaceflight with robots in space going, you know, to the Artemis, Gateway projects, is to have these robots that are up there requiring minimal crew time and becoming this assistant to the astronauts. So, it’s a combination.
Host: Yeah, yeah. And those are very important steps, where you’re thinking, even just thinking now, where we are right now and where we were with SPHERES, and then just thinking where we’re going to be, it’s all part of the journey. Going to the operations, you know, continuing this conversation really with the operations, you’re talking about flying Astrobee, and once it’s, once the astronaut turns it on, that you can do your thing. In terms of the actual operations, is it sort of like a joystick kind of control, where it’s up down, left, right, and you guys are actually flying it in real time, sending commands, and then it does what you need to do, or is it like preprogrammed maneuvers where you have some algorithm that tells it to execute, maneuver, you know, X, and then you press a button, and then it does maneuver X, or maybe a hybrid of both depending on whatever you need to do? How exactly are you flying Astrobee?
Aric Katterhagen: There are two ways that Astrobee can be, two main ways it can be maneuvered, either from the ground or real time from the astronauts in space. Right now, we’re operating everything from the ground. So we have a ground control station, a workstation we call it, all software based, that anybody who has that workstation software can, in theory, operate Astrobee. And they can operate Astrobee in two main ways. One is real time commands, which we do already, which is really exciting, and the other way is a preprogrammed, what I’d call flight patterns or sorties. You know, we can have this preprogrammed flight go to, you know, go from the dock, undock, go to point A; go from point A to point B, B to C, etc., and we can go all over the area that we’re currently mapped in with those preprogrammed paths. And we can also interject in there if needed. If Astrobee gets lost, it doesn’t quite know where it is, we can, you know, jump in. And so, there’s controlling it from the ground, either real time or preprogrammed, and even the preprogrammed I would consider real time because we’re there, of course, ready to jump in and interject if needed. So, that’s one way, from the ground. The other way is from space with the astronauts. The astronauts also have a workstation capability; we haven’t explored that yet, we’re still getting to the point of, that’s an area of research in and of itself where one astronaut can be at a computer and telling Astrobee, hey Astrobee, go do this — fly off the dock, go perch on this handrail with your perching arm, and tilt your camera towards this EXPRESS (EXpedite the PRocessing of Experiments to the Space Station) rack or this experimental rack on the space station so we can watch it from over here. That’s in the future, but it has that capability.
Host: Very cool. One last question on the operations. You mentioned the pandemic and how that’s changed, mostly in terms of location, where you’re conducting the experiments and doing this real time monitoring. Is it, is it truly, you know, everybody is in their respective homes or separate locations, and has it been seamless or has there been, you know, has it been challenging with the fact that you can’t be right, be right next to your teammates in a control room with, you know, real-time wired connections and you’re able to chat? Or is it, have you figured out over time a way to make it more seamless?
Aric Katterhagen: We have over time found a way to make it seamless, but I’ve been surprised at how we pretty quickly did it. And I think Astrobee was one of the first main projects to really kind of figure this out, and we had to do it quickly, because when the pandemic started, we were just getting to a point of where we were getting the Astrobees commissioned, as we would say. We’d get them, the three Astrobees that we flew up there, we needed to get them checked out and check out the arms, the hardware, and once we got through that commissioning phase, then we just started doing the really cool research that we wanted to do. And we were at that point when the pandemic hit. So, suddenly, we kind of came to a screeching halt really quick. And I mentioned this operations room that we have at NASA Ames in California, in Silicon Valley where we’re located, and we have this awesome room with these workstations. Each workstation has four big monitors. We’ve got these huge-screen TVs on the wall in which we get live video from the space station. The team is all in the room. You know, when we can troubleshoot, all I have to do is turn to my right, to the engineering lead and we have a discussion, and we’ve got the whole engineering, the ops team behind us. We’re all in the same room, and we just turn our chairs around and face each other and talk about what’s going on. And then I go back and talk to the crew and tell them whatever we need to do. And the test sessions that work with the team were just my favorite parts of the job. I mean we’re pulling all-nighters, but it’s just really exciting. And with the pandemic, that came to a screeching halt, and if somebody would have said we’d be doing operations remotely, I would have said no way, impossible. And a long answer to your question is we had to pivot really quickly and find a way to do it. And it turns out the resources are there. You know, in that operations room I described there’s this, aside from the computers and the monitors, which are all things you can buy at the store, which was the whole point of this room, build this room with things that are already exist, there was this black communications box that had a screen that I can talk to, you know, Houston, Huntsville, and be in communication with. Well, it turns out there’s a software version of that that you can install on your computer and run through a normal headset and allow you to have that same capability. So, having that communication ability and then having the video feeds that we normally would have going to these big monitors, those video feeds can come through a special account online, and we can see those video feeds now on our computers. It’s not these big screen monitors on the wall, but now that audio system and those video feeds are at our fingertips at our computers. Now, of course, we need special accounts to get into those things, but they exist. The challenge is we’re no longer in the same room. So, I’ll paint a picture of what a test session looks like. I think this is an interesting perspective, because when I, my friends ask me, how are you working, and I tell them, oh, I’m running this, you know, from my home from my kitchen table, they’re like, no way. And what’s happening is, see if I can describe this, from my, from my perspective is I’ve got three conversations going on at once, and those conversations would normally be happening in the same room, aside from talking to the astronauts. But our team is dialed into a central area, a Teams channel. You know, we’re using the Teams program for our email, and we have a Teams meeting that we all collaborate in on, that people are speaking freely. Well, I dial into that meeting with one phone; I’m using my computer to run this audio software to talk to the counterparts in Huntsville that I work closely with, and then on another phone I have a direct connection, a phone patch, to the crew member, the astronaut that we’re working with that day. So at any given point, there are three conversations going on that I have to juggle, which means I have to have two of those three muted at any time while the other one, whichever one is most important, is going on. It’s hard to describe. It’s a long answer to your question, but it makes it really intense because that conversation with the astronaut on the one phone is a direct connection, it’s a hot line. It’s not like a walkie-talkie where you press to talk. You have to, if I don’t have that conversation muted, that astronaut — well, all the astronauts on the space station — can hear something in the background. You know, if I’ve got a neighbor’s dog barking, they’re going to hear it. So, it has created a very interesting scenario, but we’re making it happen, and the crew members are awesome. They understand, and yeah, we had to pivot into that environment.
Host: Yeah, and that’s really the crux of it, right, is just, the challenges that have come because of that, but, and this is a theme that I’ve, you know, we’ve been even recording this podcast now for, oh, gosh, I guess, yeah, well almost two years now, completely remotely. And it’s been, you know, we’ve had our series of challenges, and we’ve heard a lot of these same stories. So it’s, that’s really the idea that we’re sharing, that there are challenges, yes, but we get the job done, and that’s the base there.
Aric Katterhagen: Yeah. And the last thing I’ll add to that is I do not cease to be amazed at what our ground team does. Like I said, I’m listening to the team on one phone, but I’m watching them online, and what they’re doing remotely, because as they’re controlling the robots real time from theirhome, there’s multiple people who are controlling and handing the controls back and forth. And my job is just to keep that conversation between them and the astronauts going, but what they’re doing, I don’t cease to be amazed at how they control the robots, stay calm, communicate with each other, and collaborate. There hasn’t been one single incidence where things have blown up on the ground, where people are frustrated and mad about something. When we’re doing real-time troubleshooting, that team is just amazing. It’s just an incredible team, and what they pull off, I just, I do not cease to be amazed.
Host: Well, let’s talk about what they pull off. Let’s get into the research of Astrobee itself. We talked about a couple of experiments, some of your favorites, of SPHERES, and you did allude to the Astrobee has the ability to dock to or maybe have some attachments for specific investigations. What have you seen so far? What has Astrobee done during its time on station in terms of research?
Aric Katterhagen: Astrobee has done a lot. We just completed our 100th test session last week, last Monday, a week ago yesterday. And that says a lot already, and I think, I’d have to look at the exact numbers but at least 40 of those or so have been remote. So, we’re coming up on having done already half of our test sessions remote, like I said, but in addition to commissioning, you’ve already completed a series of guest science programs. One was a really cool project called Gecko with the Stanford University, just down the road from us. It’s, the whole Gecko world, and going back to what I was saying, what I’m really fortunate and grateful about my job is learning all of these areas of research, like Gecko research, I never thought I would be researching or understanding, but because these brilliant Ph.D. students came along and said, hey, we want to do this Gecko project with Astrobee, you know, it’s something I got to go learn. And anyway, the project was studying how Gecko materials, just like the animal, a gecko, adheres to things. It’s a whole area of research out there if you go look it up. And it’s fascinating, it’s another way for things on the ground and in space to attach very quickly to surfaces using these Gecko materials. So, that was one example of where we brought these, the two Astrobees together, and we used the arm, we took part of the Astrobee arm off and attached this Gecko plate and studied the adherence of these materials. There was another similar project with a research group in Germany that did something similar like that. We’re working on a project with the Naval Postgraduate School down in Monterey, California, also just down the road from us, a project in which they’re studying Astrobee maneuvering with its arm and throwing itself and studying the reaction of that. There’s a whole series of experiments coming down the pipe, eventually with using, eventually probably Slosh projects down the road, and we’re doing things on our end with the arm, learning how to grab onto handrails, we’ve already had success of undocking Astrobee, flying over to a handrail and grabbing onto a handrail with the arm. The list is long, and anything that anybody can think of that they want to attach to these robots, they can come along and do. We’re working on a great project that I just remembered, the one that we did last week, is a project called SoundSee. It is an acoustic monitoring device that we attach to Astrobee, and we fly this device around and do acoustic monitoring. Similar to that is we have an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag reader that we attach to Astrobee, and we’ve already flown that around and started to do inventory on the space station. This is very, very relevant because this goes back to the conversation of how can Astrobee not only be a research platform but be a crew-assist device or do things that the crew does that takes a lot of their time, like inventory, for example. Inventory is one of the biggest, I don’t want to say problems, but one of the most important parts on station that is not probably fully understood, or like, known and respected, because it’s not this thing a lot of people talk about. But inventory on the space station is very, very important. And crew is constantly doing inventory of things. And if Astrobee can fly around and do that inventory for them, think of all the crew time we can save by having an RFID reading these RFID tags on these cargo bays and knowing where they are? So, yeah, you could have a whole long discussion in and of itself on the type of things that we’ve done and will be doing with Astrobee.
Host: Yeah. Well, well let’s get into the integration, though, because when it comes to this research you mentioned that you can, if you think of something, you can, and you want to attach it to Astrobee, the likely scenario is you can, and then you can run that investigation. But I’m sure there are several steps to get to that point, right? Before it gets on station in space to attach to Astrobee, there has to be some level of testing and integration on the ground. So, how does that work, when some researcher proposes something that they want to attach to Astrobee, how do you get from that point to testing it and then eventually flying it?
Aric Katterhagen: Yeah, I appreciate this question because this is important for people who may have an interest in Astrobee, because one of my main goals in this conversation is to not only introduce Astrobee to the world but get people interested in it and know that, hey, there’s this cool thing that you can use. So, what people first need to do is, well, come up with an idea, first of all, and then they need to understand, OK, how can I attach this to Astrobee, how would it function? And what I would invite people to do is we have a, if you just look online for NASA/Astrobee, you’ll find this NASA.gov/Astrobee, that’s our website. Very simple. Even if you just look up Astrobee, I’m sure it’s the first thing that will come up. And on that website is, we have links for, you know, contacting us and learning about other things that have been done, that even if you can’t think of something maybe you’ll get inspired by something. But all of our software is open source. Everything is out there, is available. Of course, to attach to Astrobee, there’s, you know, certain data connections and requirements you got to have. It’s all very simple though, or it’s all very accessible. There’s nothing special or top secret about it. And so, once you get the idea and you, you get this idea of how you do it, you need to get a source of funding and approval. And there’s a whole process in the background with the space station of any project that you fly up there that you go through this approval process. And let’s say you go through all that, and eventually you get approved to, to fly on Astrobee, you get on this payload integration list that you’re now approved, and then you get to the next phase of where people like me start to get involved, people from Huntsville, Alabama who work with helping people integrate their science on the space station get involved in that, it’s a whole process from there. And then eventually you get to the point of where you fly your hardware or you’re testing it. But you asked a good question about testing on the ground. So, specific to Astrobee, if you get approved to fly on Astrobee, we have a whole ground lab that we do everything we can to test these projects before we fly them. We don’t just fly them and hope they will work. And at NASA Ames, we have two main ways that we do that. So, aside from software simulators, which we have, which are very important, there are these two laboratories we have. One’s called a Granite Lab. It’s this 3 by 3 meter, approximately, huge slab of granite, and we have a simulated miniature space station environment with the walls. And the best way to describe it is, I describe it as a reverse air hockey table. So if you ever played, you know, the air hockey with the puck that you’re sliding around? It’s that puck is sliding on that table with air shooting up, right? It’s floating on that air, and then you’re pushing the puck back and forth. In our Granite Lab it’s the reverse concept. We have the Astrobee on this pedestal, sort of this platform, and again, carbon dioxide is, the carbon dioxide is being focused and pushed down so much that it’s floating the Astrobee on this platform on the granite table. So, we can move really in three degrees of freedom. I think it’s an X, you know, an XY, and then sort of a yaw that we can do, I believe, but we’re limited to that range of motion. And then, a second room that we have, which is still being developed more, is we have this gantry, which is a much larger lab and looks more like, whereas the granite table is this square granite table, this gantry lab is this more longer, narrow, simulated space station environment. And it’s this gantry, in which we attach the Astrobee, and it’s off the floor it’s not on a table, but like it’s moving through this space on this gantry, and we can get six degrees of freedom out of that. So we can test the movements, test different capabilities, whatever the experiment may be. So we have a whole software and ground capability to help researchers get, fine tune their research, and then eventually get it to space station if they need to.
Host: Very cool. And that’s super-critical, right? I mean we want to make sure that it’s working, and you have the lab space, very cool lab space, to be able to test that and everything. All kinds of interesting things. A hundred runs — congratulations to you and your team. It’s been quite a journey, and, and really, the journey has led you to this moment where you’re, you know, you’re 100 runs in, you’re able to do, you have this new, I’ll say new but, you know, you took the next step with technology with Astrobee versus SPHERES, you know, limiting consumables and all of this stuff, so it’s just an ever-progressing thing. I think, you know, to sort of start wrapping up this conversation, I want to talk about the future, and one of the things you talked about was, you know, daily life on station, and that seems very important to the goals of Astrobee and what flying robots could be capable of in space. Really, just being assistants: they could do inventory, they could do the coffee run, whatever you could think of, that’s the goal here, it sounds like. What is, what is that future if you were to paint it for us that you imagine, if you imagine humans and robots working side by side, what exactly is the extent of that? What are they doing? How are they integrated? How does it work? You know, and how far are you thinking that it would go, right, even outside the station? Is that even a possibility? What is, what is the future that you’re imagining with humans and robots working together?
Aric Katterhagen: You just touched on a question that we’re often asked is, can the Astrobees go outside? And that was a question early on in the design process. And that’s usually the biggest consideration you have to take into designing a robot for the space station or any long-duration spaceflight, is can this robot go outside or is it just inside? And there’s huge design considerations that need to be taken into account for that, and I won’t dive into that too much, but the Astrobees as they work, they’re fan-driven, you know, compared to SPHERES, which were gas driven; that fan-driven system is not going to work outside the space station. It’s a vacuum, right, so there’s no air that Astrobee can pull in to compress and create its own propulsion. So, in that example, that’s where SPHERES would actually be a better design, something with gas. And I think what’s really interesting there is, and we didn’t have the opportunity to go into this, but the concept of robots in space, like I said, is nothing new. Back in 1987 there was a project on flight STS-87, in which they flew a robot outside of the space shuttle — or it was 1997, 1997, the flight was STS-87. So, shuttle flight 87, 1997. And if I remember correctly, they flew it for about an hour and a half out into the cargo bay of the shuttle: free flying, out in space, in the cargo bay of the shuttle. That’s huge. In 1997, because when you think about it, the space shuttle is traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, just like the space station, more or less. And to put a robot out in that environment outside, free flying, is, is a huge step, because if something goes wrong and that robot now becomes a flying object that’s not in control, you’ve got issues. So, anyway, going back to your question about inside and outside, there’s really different considerations when you do that. I definitely see robots outside the space station eventually. The first steps would be probably having them, just like the station arm, where it’s on a gantry and it’s moving attached to the arm, and it’s doing inspections, that’s probably a next step for robots like SPHERES and Astrobee outside is having something like that. But to stay focused inside of the space station, this is the reality we’re in now, which is exciting. And the more immediate applications to robots inside the space station, especially with free flyers, will be with upcoming projects already in place. Gateway, Artemis, which I’ve mentioned; we actually have a project at Ames right now that is called ISAAC, and this project is intended to study applications to ISAAC. And ISAAC is, if I remember, it’s Integrated System for Autonomous and Adaptive Caretaking is the acronym, but it’s, that team is the original team, a lot of members from there were the team that helped build Astrobee. So, we worked very closely with them, and we’ve already done three test sessions with them. And they are studying how we can go around and do monitoring of, monitor whether, it’s sounds or potential gas leaks. So, as we take that next step to go into longer duration and further away from Earth, we’re going to need robots that can fly around and test things and look at things, monitor things, even repair things, take inventory, and then send that data back to Earth so that we can make sure that the vehicle is in a healthy vehicle for the astronauts to arrive or continue to live in.
Host: The vision being that robots are, are part of the mission, that they’re there to assist the astronauts through, you know, as we continue to go to the Moon and beyond, that’s the idea here, is to have these assistants be preparing the station for them, keeping the astronauts safe by monitoring all the different things. The future you’re envisioning is truly one where these types of robots are fully integrated into a human mission.
Aric Katterhagen: Absolutely, absolutely. They’re essential.
Host: Very cool. [Laughter] Well, that’s the next generation, right? That’s what we’re thinking of, and it’s all thanks to the work that you’re doing now and continuing to evolve and do an incredible number of tests runs and learning so much along the way. So, Aric Katterhagen, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast. This has been truly informative to learn so much about Astrobee and how it works and the challenges that have been overcome to continue working on it and continue, you know, learning what it takes to have these be part of, you know, integrated into human missions, to explore the universe. So, thank you very much for coming on. Appreciate your time.
Aric Katterhagen: Yeah, I appreciate you bringing attention to Astrobee and, again, thanks to you and your team for all that you do to educate people on this.
Host: [Laughter] Well, thank you. Take care, Aric.
Aric Katterhagen: Take care.
[ Music]
Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed this conversation about Astrobee as much as I did. I certainly learned a lot. There’s a lot more that we could have dove into to understand more about this robot and the research that’s going on on station, but if you’re interested and you’d like to explore more about what’s going on, we have a lot of content at NASA.gov that you can browse. NASA.gov/iss is our International Space Station page; there’s a section off to the left called Research and Technology, so you can explore what’s going on in Astrobee as well as all the other experiments going on on station. And then of course you can explore the Ames Research Center page to learn more about what’s going on there. We’re one of many podcasts at NASA: check us out at NASA.gov/podcasts. You can see our full collection and listen to any episode in no particular order as well as the many other podcasts we have across the agency. You want to talk to us specifically on social media, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea or ask a question for us, just make sure to mention it’s for Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on January 11, 2022. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Heidi Lavelle, Belinda Pulido, Nicole Rose, Rachel Barry, and Gina Figliozzi. And of course, thanks again to Aric Katterhagen for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.