Experimental Google Smartphone Becomes Brain Of Space Robot

Research engineer D.W. Wheeler and Terry Fong, NASA's director of the Intelligent Robotics Group, flank the SPHERES utility robot with the Project Tango smartphone mounted on the side. Robots excel at the tedious, repetitive tasks that bore humans into ineffectiveness. So NASA has tweaked an experimental Google smartphone called "Project Tango" that takes 250,000 measurements per second to create a 3-D map of the environment. The hacked version of Project Tango will help provide navigation information for a utility robot that previously had limited autonomous motion capability, called SPHERES. The robot/phone hybrid will launch in an Orbital Sciences Cygnus spacecraft aboard an Antares rocket on June 10th.