Robots have long been helping people in space. Humanity has sent rovers to Mars and spacecraft to orbit other planets. Robots have even helped astronauts on the International Space Station. After all, they can help humans perform repetitive or even dangerous tasks.
Subha Comandur, a robotics engineer at NASA, tells about this.
“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,” Comandur said.
NASA is currently building even more advanced, intelligent, and agile robots. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they are working on a project called CADRE, short for Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration. CADRE is a network of shoebox-sized mobile robots that will coordinate with each other to achieve a goal, such as exploring or mapping an area.
Without a human controller, this technology will change the way we think about missions in the future and open up huge opportunities. They can explore areas that are hard to reach for humans, such as lava tubes, ice caves, or subsurface oceans in search of water and other minerals. And it would be good even if the robot doesn’t have time to return, because it would share 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,” adds the NASA robotics engineer.
