Two of my greater passions in life are space and technology.
Ever since I was a kid, space has been a passion of mind. I credit my grandmother for instilling this passion within me; even on her death bed she lauded the 1969 moon landing and what man had accomplished in her lifetime. However, as I have grown older, the passion has never waned. Philosophically, I think there is some innate drive within humanity to understand our existence and purpose within it. For me, this hungering for the unknown is most apparent in the exploration of space, the last great frontier.
My passion for technology developed in almost an exact opposite way. Even as late as my junior year in high school, I was much more interested in being an athlete than an engineer or scientist. To this day, I’m still not sure why picked chemical engineering for my first degree, probably money. However, some time during my tenure working in chemical manufacturing I realized I really enjoyed understanding how things work, especially electronic systems. Fast forward a few years and I decided to enroll back in school for computer science, and discovered a passion for all things robotic.
All that to say, I really like space robots. Which brings me to the actual topic of this post, which is a NASA article about the ISAAC Project:
ISAAC stands for Integrated System for Autonomous and Adaptive Caretaking and is a project set forth by NASA to use enhanced robotics to respond to fault scenarios aboard the International Space Station (ISS). For example, consider the scenario in the article:
A freezer that is filled with experimental samples fails unexpectedly and the samples need to be moved to another freezer quickly. Instead of sending a human back and forth between freezers, why not have the samples moved by an autonomous robot?
The article goes onto highlight several accomplishments that the ISAAC program has already achieved, inlcuding:
- Autonomous robotic navigation between modules inside a spacecraft
- Multiple robots operating together in different modules of a spacecraft
- Robotic location of a sound source inside a spacecraft
- Robotic surveillance of a spacecraft interior for mapping to enable human viewing
This is where my imagination starts to run wild. Imagine that you no longer need astronauts on the ISS because robots can perform all of the necessary maintenance and experimental tasks. Astronauts would no longer have to be put at risk when traveling to or staying at the ISS. Future ISS designs could remove many of the life-critical system that are no longer needed (ie. oxygen supply, CO2 scrubbers, etc.), making more space available for experimental work and reducing the cost of maintaining and operating.
The possibilities are limitless and I am optimistic about what our future may hold!
