Gadgetory

Astra bee is a robot operates on this International Space Station and it's used as a research platform for Space Exploration and living in space it's a robot that can be used to study how to program satellites to operate how to program robots to interact with astronauts so it can monitor different things like radiation sound it's a mobile camera platform that can go anywhere inside a space station to visualize what the astronauts are doing or what different parts of space station are doing and it can also support the astronaut and doing procedures and different types of a maintenance tasks on Space Station it's very much like the Roomba of space station to be as is is a next-generation free flyer that builds off of a current free flyer operating on the space station called spheres spheres was first built by MIT and as the origin story goes there was an MIT professor who challenged his senior design class to build the same type of droid robot that you see in Star Wars Astra B's being designed to be a lot more automated a lot more self-sufficient so it's got a docking station they can go recharge go back out do what it needs to for hours at a time and then go back all without astronauts being around so I can do these things all by itself so what you see here is an air carriage holding an Astra B prototype on the top we have co2 cartridges here that send out compressed co2 between the air carriage and this table so that's a little cushion of air that it floats on top of and it can move anywhere on this table with almost no friction you can see the a touch screen there is the intake for fans that keeps the circuits inside cool different cameras on the top that help it navigate where it is on the space station this is where the batteries plug in on the bottom and then this whole area is open for other hardware to plug into it and in the back on the top is where the perching arm is so this little arm can pop out and it's got this little gripper that can grab on to an handrail at the blue handrails that are all over space station that astronauts actually use to move around as it turns out astronauts do spend a lot of time repositioning cameras they do spend a lot of time taking measurements and samples all around space station they do spend a lot of time looking for things and trying to find different things on Space Station so these are all things that a robot can do all by itself and save astronauts a lot of time there are concepts of sending spacecraft to the moon or to Mars without astronauts so that it all gets brought together and astronauts get there later so we need robots there that can maintain and do these things even when astronauts aren't there