Pistol-packing robot turns space cowboy

practical significance in various fields.’’

In a less macho mission, Fedor – Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research – will today blast into space on a Soyuz rocket to spend two weeks on the international space station.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, was keen to point out that Fedor would fly in the commander’s chair on the unmanned craft, in contrast to the Nasa android Robonaut 2, which was in a cargo hold when it travelled to the station in 2011.

Alexander Bloshenko, a science adviser to Rogozin, who runs the space agency, said that Fedor could work autonomously or under remote control in avatar mode at the station, and he would assist the cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov with a series of unspecified tasks in microgravity.

In a radio interview, Bloshenko claimed that the robot ‘‘can communicate on any topic launched by its interlocutor’’ and is ‘‘very sociable, it has a sense of humour’’.

But Fedor has not completely thrown off all his notorious past, because he is also known as Skybot F-850, which appears to be a heavy nod towards the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in the 2003 film Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, portrays a T-850, a muscle-bound killer robot that battles against another robot called a Skynet T-X, or Terminatrix, of advanced and almost indestructable artificial intelligence.

Fedor has his own Twitter account, on which ‘‘he’’ recently posted a collage of himself clutching a handgun. – The Times