Astrobee: NASA's Newest Robot for the International Space Station

The International Space Station will soon be getting some new robot occupants. Astrobee is a robotic cube packed with sensors, cameras, computers, and a propulsion system. It's designed to help astronauts around the ISS with a variety of tasks. While the robot is designed to fly freely on board the ISS, for testing on the ground, Astrobee is mounted on top of a sled that uses a jet of CO2 to create a low-friction air bearing above a perfectly flat (and very enormous) block of granite. This allows the researchers to simulate microgravity in two dimensions to test the robot's propulsion and navigation systems, but once it's up in space, the entire robot will consist of just the cube that's defined by the blue bumpers, without all of the stuff underneath it.