R is for Robot

Space Robots

• Planetary• Exploration Space Vehicles• Space Construction– Stationary– Walkers– Free-flying

• Teleoperated vs Autonomous– Perhaps mix for near earth asteroid exploitation

Planetary Robots

• Rovers• Fliers• On board labs• Drilling units• Asteroid Samplers• Landscaping• Construction

Space Robot Issues

• Mobility– Across various terrains, flying– In space (walking,crawling, free flight, navigation)

• Manipulation– In micro-gravity anchoring and compensating careful

movements • Extreme conditions– Deep space cold to hundreds of degrees– Ionizing radiation– Hard vacuum

Mars Science Laboratory

Exo-Mars Driller

ARES robot plane

BIGDOG

Scarab Lunar Drilling Robot

Giant Walking Lunar Habitat

ATHLETE Lunar Rover

DALI-ATHLETE chassis

Hayabasa Asteroid Probe

Walking inspection & maintenance

Atlas VR2

DEXTRE

Robonaut

Immortality through robots?

• Upload into robot body• Consider exo-cortex implications– What cannot be uploaded is in external processing

units• Perhaps even the original biological one

– Even tight brain to robot communication is a beginning

Recent Robot Abilities

• A new robot skin is at least as sensitive as human skin– Sensitive enough to register the steps of a

butterfly

• What’s left? Taste and smell?– Both simple molecular samplers.. Easy

• Of course BCI or BRI is needed– Advanced form of tele-operations• Surrogates