Star Wars-inspired flying robots joining space station crew

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will soon be joined by a crew of free-flying mini-robots inspired by the Jedi training droids that Luke Skywalker practiced his light saber skills with in Star Wars. NASA's one-foot-cube Astrobees will be packed with cameras, sensors, and other tools and travel around the space station; its tasks will be far more mundane, however, than the movie training droids. The bots will help with tasks like measuring noise levels, testing carbon dioxide concentrations, or shooting video of astronauts at work. Ground crews will be able to remotely control the robot, sending it to various station waypoints, or even giving it a set of tasks to carry out largely autonomously, says Trey Smith, a research scientist in NASA's Intelligent Robotics Group. "In the end, it should be able to depart from its dock, do an entire survey of several modules, and then return to its dock at the end of it," he says.