NASA is about to launch a robot that keeps track of astronauts' activities

Separated astronauts inside the International Space Station (ISS) are about to have new friends as robots. Three self-propelled cube-shaped robots will move in space and record the movements of astronauts.

Free flying robots are called Astrobees . They can move around ISS, film astronauts' activities, power new scientific experiments and help NASA locate lost devices.

Chris Provencher, Astrobees project manager at NASA Ames Research Center, said: "We want robots to be able to fly around the space station without crew supervision."

The team at Ames in California has spent many years designing and building Astrobees robots. But they are not the first robots to work with astronauts inside ISS.

The plan is to replace three spherical devices, called SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellite - satellites with synchronous, interactive, orientation, test satellites) . They were taken to the space station in 2006.

According to NASA, their professor asked to build a copy of the Jedi training spacecraft (known as the remote) - inspired by the movie "Star Wars". MIT's unmanned spacecraft (or the Astrobees robot) in real life do not fire laser beams like in the film. However, spacecraft use compressed air to move in a gravityless state and astronauts can control them from a laptop on the ISS.

The researchers made dozens of experiments with robots. These robots can form during flight and have special things attached. In fact, over the past decade, there have been over 100 different academic studies on the SPHERES program. Some software is tested to help satellites avoid hitting each other in space, while others examine ways to build large telescopes from a range of small, self-propelled robots.

The robot can handle many jobs in the space station.(Photo: NASA).

However, according to writer Evan Ackerman in a recent story at IEEE Spectrum, in the 11th year in space, red, blue and orange robots seem to be getting older and becoming obsolete.

SPHERES robot does not have any camcorder to record and transmit video to Earth. In the space there is a problem that not many people know about film activities, but it is important to record experiments and educational events. Therefore, NASA wants its astronauts to focus on performing experiments instead of struggling to adjust the camcorder.

People who oversee missions at the Johnson Space Center in Houston also want to improve the crew's "situational awareness" . This is another way of expressing how they want better ways to track people's valuable goods.

Provencher said: "Right now, many people want to see things inside the space station. Some cameras are set up and located in fixed positions. By letting the robot fly around with a machine. HD photos, people will see what they want to see ".

Checking air quality, tracking large sounds, recording new shipments, and finding lost items in the lab are extremely boring and time-consuming things for astronauts. Therefore, Astrobee will be installing sensors and an RFID scanner to handle these tasks.

Provencher added: "There are thousands of devices on the space station that must be tracked and identified accurately."

To be able to operate in the zero gravity area, the Astrobee has a fan in the center to suck and compress the air. When ready to move the robot will direct the air to one or more than 12 taps. Like small jets, robots need to create a lot of force to push and direct each cube towards the destination.

When operating on its own, Astrobees will navigate using an internal 3D map of the space station. However, job supervisors can also control these miniature Astrobees spacecraft from Earth. For example, when NASA wants robots to stop and film, Astrobee can fold an arm and press the button.

Companies can also develop "parts" for Astrobee - parts that will be fixed to modular mount points, Provencher said. The robot will use lithium-ion batteries to operate. They can last for several hours when the robot flies and filmed at the same time. When the battery is running low, Astrobee will automatically navigate to a dock to charge the battery through the space station's solar panel.

NASA is expected to launch the Astrobee program for ISS around September 2017.