ROBONAUTS

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Engineers built a robonaut which looks like a person. It’s a NASA robot. With the help of its appearance and body, it’s easier to do human jobs like a real person. The robonaut is in The International Space Station at the moment and helps with things there.

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It was 1996 when NASA started working on the Robonaut project. After four years, in 2000 they produced the first version. Since 2000, engineers have worked on furthering its development. The latest model, Robonaut 2 or R2, was created by NASA and a car manufacturer called General Motors. This robonaut has a body like a person and cameras in his head for vision. Thanks to its human like hands and fingers, it’s skilful and it can easily do the tasks that can be done by a person. Additionally, it can move around.

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Robonaut has two functions. It can “think” for itself. R2 can find the way when people give it tasks to do. Its software can be updated regularly to make it able to do the new tasks. It can also be controlled remotely. A person who operates R2 can see what it sees using the headset and the operator can make the Robonaut move.

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R2 was sent to the space station on the shuttle Discovery on the STS-133 mission. Firstly, it’ll stay in the laboratory so that NASA can see how well it works there because NASA wants to see if R2 works as well as on Earth.

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It’s not only NASA who takes advantage of using R2, General Motors also has plans to use it for various purposes. Their first aim is to make cars safer. NASA is still working on the future usage of Robonaut, but if it passes the test inside of the station, NASA could test it out of the space station. The tests will show us how well it can work with, or instead of, astronauts. Engineers are dreaming about sending a robot like R2 to another world one day.

Adapted from Readworks’ article.