GITAI Partners With JAXA To Send Telepresence Robots To Space (ieee.org)

GITAI is a robotics startup with offices in Japan and the United States that's developing tech to put humanoid telepresence robots in space to take over for astronauts. IEEE: This week, GITAI is announcing a joint research agreement with JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) to see what it takes for robots to be useful in orbit, with the goal of substantially reducing the amount of money spent sending food and air up to those demanding humans on the International Space Station. It's also worth noting that GITAI has some new hires, including folks from the famous (and somewhat mysterious) Japanese bipedal robot company SCHAFT.

[...] GITAI says that their robots will "reduce the cost of space work to 10 percent" of the cost of using a real astronaut, by instead relying on earthbound humans for immersive teleoperation. As you might expect, the trouble with immersive teleoperation between Earth and orbit is getting data back and forth over a restrictive network. Part of GITAI's secret sauce involves compressing "data of 360-degree camera with resolution of 2.7K from original data volume of 800 Mbps to average 2.5 Mbps." At the same time, they've managed to reduce latency to 60 ms, which is really quite good, for talking to space. The plan is to get all of this working in low Earth orbit by 2020.

Comments

danger will robinson

[Anonymous Coward]

things were so much less complicated?

Telepresence ROBOTS!? Iggymanz will be furious!

[Anonymous Coward]

He spent hours trying to convince the world that they "weren't actually robots" lol. I know, retard level fail. You can't fix stupid, you can only hope to blast it into space, where no one can hear its retarded arguments.

telepresence

[Anonymous Coward]

I...wait...so aliens are going to see the telepresence of Sheldon rolling down the hall with a T-shirt hanging from the monitor?

YOU NEVER GET A SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION

Re:telepresence

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately telepresence isn't required, we've been broadcasting that shitty sitcom into space for the better part of a decade already. Alien sightings down DRAMATICALLY since the 80's, coincidence? Fuck no.

"Earth entertainment culture sucks" - Written on the moon in space braille.

Re: telepresence

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even aliens can travel faster than light -- sorry Star Trek fans, no warp speed -- so it'd be a one way trip. And for what? Fake news and politics? Yeah, right, I'm sure there are better places in the galaxy to visit. Earth sux ass.

Re: telepresence

[Anonymous Coward]

"Not even aliens can travel faster than light" - Oh? So how many responded to your polling anyway, I'm just curious as Andrew Breitbart in Hell...

win

[Anonymous Coward]

So they can nuke us from orbit. I like it!

A simple compression operation

[SuperKendall]

Where there is space, just send black (0), no need for Skippy the Wrench to see all the pretty stars.

Then for the rest of the scene, describe the object the camera is seeing in terms of lego blocks, which are small and render well into any object as Lego has demonstrated repeatedly via parks and video games.

Missing the point

[Immerman]

>with the goal of substantially reducing the amount of money spent sending food and air up to those demanding humans on the International Space Station.

I'm embarrassed to see that level of missing-the-point from IEEE Spectrum, even as a joke (I hope). Robotic telepresence has nothing to do with reducing the human presence on the ISS - the ISS exists primarily to develop the technologies to keep humans alive and healthy in space (discovering the biggest problems being step one in that process).

Telepresence robots are about allowing us to expand our capabilities far beyond the ISS without the costs and risks of subjecting all the necessary workers to the risks. Especially by allowing people to work remotely in the hazardous environments in space, rather than having to go EVA. Perhaps some of the workers will remote in from Earth, though with a round-trip lag that increases to more than 133 milliseconds between surface and low orbit (the time taken for a light to travel halfway around the Earth and back again), they will substantially increase reaction times, and thus be unsuitable for anything that requires any kind of fast reflexes. But that still leaves a *lot* of jobs that could be done remotely, if slightly awkwardly. With practice you could probably compensate for the extra ~1/8th of a second of lag fairly well, especially if lag was artificially added so that it remained constant at the worst-case situation, rather than constantly changing.

They're hardly limited to orbital applications either - the moon would introduce a minimum of 2.6 seconds of lag for Earth-based operators, which would probably be too much to manually compensate for with anything that involves any reflexes - but you might be able to develop "AI reflexes" that can anticipate your intentions well enough for most situations. Or, you just have the operators safely inside a lunar habitat while they work remotely on the surface without worrying about radiation, oxygen, etc. Save the EVAs for recreation and especially difficult problems (though it seems to me that a good telepresence robot should be at least as dexterous as a person wearing bulky vacuum/radiation gloves.)

And of course, there's no reason a telepresence robot has to be bound by human limitations. A 10m tall robot torso with its "eyes" 60 cm apart would let an operator do large-scale assembly at an apparent 1/10th scale, without the awkwardness normally associated with operating banks of levers, etc. to control the dozens of degrees of freedom available.

Re:Missing the point

[wooferhound]

Aren't all the Space Probes "Telepresence Robots" ?

Re:Missing the point

[Graymalkin]

The stress of spacewalks in likely also a major consideration. Spacesuits are not easy to work in and are very uncomfortable. Astronauts do spacewalks because they're astronauts, not because spacewalks are easy or comfortable. There's also a hard limit on a suit's endurance, there's a limited amount of air, temperature control, and power available. For reference here's a list of all the ISS spacewalks, the longest was almost nine hours with the majority between six and eight hours. You'll notice that 214 spacewalks are listed over twenty one years. Spacewalks are not trivial for ISS crews to perform.

If they had ready access to telepresence robots they could perform a remote "spacewalk" whenever they had the slightest justification for doing so. If SpaceBot gets smacked with some orbital debris or bombarded with charged particles they don't need to write a sad letter to SpaceBot's family or watch them die from super cancer.

The ISS crew could also take turns controlling SpaceBot so the operator is always alert and rested. If they run into a blocking issue they can hit pause on SpaceBot for an indefinite period as there's no astronaut burning through O2 at the end of the MSS.

Re:Missing the point

[rtb61]

Why protect those, who want the risk. Reality is the core stuff should be the focus, life support, better space drives, sturdier hulls. There are literally millions of people who very much want to take that risk.

Re:Missing the point

[Immerman]

Not even remotely. They're teleoperated, but telepresence allows you to "be there", interacting with the remote location using a robotic proxy, often via a VR interface (as appears to be the case here). That's not remotely possible with the lag involved beyond Earth orbit.

Re:Missing the point

[Immerman]

I suppose for clarity I should say: ...interacting with the remote location in real time using a robotic proxy...

Re:Missing the point

[Immerman]

Most people aren't in it for the risk, that's just the price of admission. And if you can dramatically lower the risk by making robotic-EVAs a perfectly viable alternative for most things, instead of a dangerous, unpleasant, in-person ordeal, then you greatly increase the amount you accomplish with a given amount of manpower.

You still need people on-location, facing the unavoidable risks that come with that. But they don't have to be outside on a regular basis, doing all the dangerous construction, maintenance, mining, etc. that is needed, with nothing but a easily-damaged space suit between them and near-instant death.

Re:Missing the point

[Immerman]

Quite so.

Now think construction, mining, refining,etc. - all the things that will need to be done routinely, as somebody's go-to-work-every-morning day job, if we're going to actually colonize space instead of just having a few off-planet laboratories.

Lots of people talk about having autonomous robots to do all that for us, and I'm sure someday we will, but probably not for a very long time - by all appearances the AI required to handle that is still a long way off. We've made great strides on robotic bodies though, and telepresence effectively lets you create cyborgs - human minds controlling robotic bodies as if they were their own. A fleet of automated robots to do the "dumb" tasks, complemented by a team of body-hopping "cyborgs" doing the stuff that needs a human touch? You might well be able to actually have an entire industrial park where people work every day, but rarely if ever set foot in the flesh. And of course such a system would scale beautifully as automation improved - all the "workers" are already robots, it's only a question of whether they're controlled by a human mind or an AI.

Whiny lying faggot Kendall's dishonesty : solved

[Anonymous Coward]

" They see people almost being denied a supreme court seat because they once had a beer while in school." - No, he perjured himself under oath. It's not the beer, you lying faggot. IT'S THE LYING, YOU LYING FAGGOT.

Kavanaugh pretended his "Renate Alumnius" was a badge of honor, that "boofing" wasn't anal sex (it was, I was alive then and that was the slang) and "Devil's Triangle" wasn't a drinking game. It clearly is.

YOU TELL A LIE UNDER OATH AND YOU ARE A CRIMINAL. That he basically ATTEMPTED TO RAPE A CLASSMATE also didn't really rise to the occasion of a lifetime appointment to the SCOTUS without investigation.

But with TRAITOR SUPPORTING DISHONEST FAGGOTS LIKE YOURSELF in charge? He sailed right through anyway, to lie another day.

Dry your eyes, traitor. Your little perjurer didn't get caught - yet!

https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13577626&cid=58274188

1.3 light seconds to the moon

[Anonymous Coward]

So how far away are we really to a telepresence on the moon (that is 1.3 light seconds away)?

Re:1.3 light seconds to the moon

[Immerman]

We can't. Ever. Not really. Not without rewriting the laws of physics. 1.3 light-seconds away means 2.6 seconds of unavoidable lag. You might be able to operate a "Diablo style" point-and-click RPG style interface serviceably with that kind of lag, micro-managing a limited-intelligence robot, but it will always be woefully inadequate for a "First Person" VR experience.

Not necessarily completely unserviceable, especially with 360* VR recording so that you can at least look around in "real time" (though 1.3 seconds into the past). Take things slow and easy, and as long as there's no chaotic interference on the moon, you could get things done. Eventually.

Much better though to have the operator *also* on the moon, comfortably secure within a nice safe habitat while they operate the same telepresence robot in real time.

Or, combine the two. A Moonie technician can be operating a "cyborg" body in real time, while a team on Earth offer guidance from a 2.6 seconds in the past.

The space station was never about science

[aberglas]

It was always, specifically, about putting humans in space. Just because it is there. Much like climbing a mountain.

Of course everything now done by astronauts could be done by robots for much less cost. Ordinary people/taxpayers cannot understand science, but they can understand humans in space.

(Personally I would rather they spend the money on science rather than humans in space. The MIR was a great space experiment, humans in space for an extended period. But that was long ago and done.)

Re: The space station was never about science

[Anonymous Coward]

The US manned space program has largely ceased to be much more than a welfare program for rocket companies, including in Russia.

Re:The space station was never about science

[Immerman]

Actually it is about science - but the real science is mostly studying the hazards of living in space, and how to mitigate them. The astronauts are highly-competent lab rats - the additional science they perform themselves is mostly just icing on the cake.

And we're not doing that "just because it's there", but because space offers an *enormous* font of wealth and opportunity, and the only possible place our species can survive in the long term. But first we have to develop the technology to survive there.

Re:The space station was never about science

[Anonymous Coward]

Any useful exploitation of space will be done by robots, like Curiosity. Amazing to see photos from the surface of other planets, just like you were there.

Over the next 100 years or so, our species will be replaced by robots. And then robots may, indeed, be able to live in space.

Re:The space station was never about science

[Immerman]

Robots operating in a complex natural environment are going to be a lot more useful with a real-time human operator, than they are under the control of a feeble AI (and there's no evidence that non-feeble AIs are anywhere in the near future). And that means you have to have people living and working out there, without a half-hour or more of unavoidable speed-of-light lag.

Maybe it's just a small team of body-hopping telepresence "cyborgs" that handle the problems, with an army of autonomous robots at their command for the day-to-day operations. But they need to be out there where they can deal with problems in real time, rather than having a mine or assembly line be down for months at a time because of a mysterious malfunction the AI can't repair.

And once we have the technology to let people live out there, and the infrastructure for routinely transporting large amounts of materials back and forth cost-effectively, then it's only a matter of time before people immigrate there to start new societies without the restrictions imposed by the old one. We are a species of explorers, we thrived and conquered our world because some of us always dream of a better world over the horizon, and go out to build it. We are at our best, and our worst, on the frontier. Building new societies from the rich resources of a location too far away for old governments to care about us much.

Space is going to be bleak, especially early on, so it will probably only be the most desperate of dreamers who lead the charge. But with nigh-unlimited resources and the promise of not having any nearby neighbors for generations, at least, there will still be some tiny percentage of people willing to try to build their personal vision of utopia, even if they have to carve an ecosystem out of dead rock to do it. 0.1% maybe? That's still 7 million people, enough for a hundred small island nations, augmented by as many robots as they can afford to buy or build. Indentured servitude helped the poor migrate to the early American colonies - I'm sure similar opportunities will be available in space, at least in some of the colonies.

Galileo was Right

[davesays]

"From the Earth to the Moon" Episode 10 "Galileo Was Right" tells the story of *why* humans are valuable. Robots test what they are told to test, by humans. Humans have a far better grasp of surveying a whole scene to decide what is important. Checking out the episode is likely worth the time even if you disagree...