NASA has two robots that will, hopefully, be working on the International Space Station (ISS) this year. There’s Robonaut, a humanoid (complete with legs) that will be on its way up there later this year, as well as Astrobee, a family of three free-flying robotic cubes that are already on the ISS as of a couple of weeks ago.
 
Astrobee and Robonaut are completely different in both form and function, but that just means that they have skills and abilities that complement each other, and the teams running on these robots have been getting plans for on-orbit teamwork. To learn more about this collaboration, we spoke to Astrobee technical lead Trey Smith and Robonaut project manager Julia Badger.
 
From the voice of things, once both Astrobee and Robonaut have been verified out on-station, these collaborative tasks will be a fairly extreme priority. And since the robots have a great amount of autonomy, requiring minimal crew tending, we’re optimistic that it’ll actually take place sooner rather than later. Hopefully, NASA will hold us up to date on how things go — and if they don’t, we’re totally ready to visit the ISS in person just to see what’s up.
 



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com