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SpaceX Will Send an AI Robot To Join Astronauts On ISS (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Seattle Times: A robot with true artificial intelligence is about to invade space. The large, round, plastic robot head is part of SpaceX's latest supply delivery to the International Space Station. Friday's pre-dawn liftoff also includes two sets of genetically identical female mice, 20 mousestronauts that will pick up where NASA's identical twin brother astronauts left off a few years ago. Super-caffeinated coffee is also flying up for the space station's java-craving crew.
As intriguing as identical space siblings and turbo-charged space coffee may be, it's the German robot -- named Cimon, pronounced Simon, after a genius doctor in science fiction's "Captain Future" -- that's stealing the show. Like HAL, the autonomous Cimon is an acronym: it stands for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. Its AI brain is courtesy of IBM. German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who arrived at the orbiting lab a month ago, will introduce Cimon to space life during three one-hour sessions. Already savvy about Gerst's science experiments, the self-propelling Cimon will float at the astronaut's side and help, when asked, with research procedures. To get Cimon's attention, Gerst will need only to call its name. Their common language will be English, the official language of the space station.
As intriguing as identical space siblings and turbo-charged space coffee may be, it's the German robot -- named Cimon, pronounced Simon, after a genius doctor in science fiction's "Captain Future" -- that's stealing the show. Like HAL, the autonomous Cimon is an acronym: it stands for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. Its AI brain is courtesy of IBM. German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who arrived at the orbiting lab a month ago, will introduce Cimon to space life during three one-hour sessions. Already savvy about Gerst's science experiments, the self-propelling Cimon will float at the astronaut's side and help, when asked, with research procedures. To get Cimon's attention, Gerst will need only to call its name. Their common language will be English, the official language of the space station.
I'm on site for this launch, and got to meet and interview some of the people working on it. It's essentially a front-end device for Watson, helping it to navigate around the space station and try to be useful for the scientists on board. Right this second, it seems more of a novelty, but the impellers driving it mean that it should be able to self navigate, and collect some good data from the interactions. They said the latency for connecting to the Watson infrastructure on the ground is around two seconds. This is also the first test of this technology in space, so they have a long way to go, and a lot of basic things to work out, but it's something that the platform can only grow stronger from, if they proceed with future testing, so as to be more useful for the astronauts. It struck me as a floating iPad with voice activation and natural speech recognition, but might prove to be more as time goes on and they start assigning value to it.