Robot takes big step for hopes of living in space

EXPERTS have pulled off a major advance that might one day help build new worlds in space after an astronaut in the International Space Station remotely guided a robot on Earth by feel.

Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen performed the task in which he placed a peg into a very tight hole on Monday under the careful control of the European Space Agency.

While orbiting some 400km above Earth, Mogensen took control of the Interact Centaur rover which has a pair of arms for high-precision work.

The blue-and-white fibreglass robot, which cost less than ß200 000 (R3.2-million) to build, also has a camera on its head, enabling the controller to see the task directly.

But sight is not the most important sense – it is touch.

In real-time, thanks to super-swift signals bouncing off a dedicated complex system of satellites working in synchronisation, the astronaut manoeuvred the robot into place.

He then very slowly lowered a metal pin held by the robot into a tight hole in a task board with less than a sixth of a millimetre of wriggle room.

For the first time – thanks to force-feedback technology – when the pin was not aligned correctly, Mogensen felt it hit the sides of the hole via the joystick he was operating.

Cheers erupted when after several long nail-biting minutes the rover dropped the pin into place.

Scientists and engineers believe applications of this kind of tactile technology are huge – enabling humans to guide robots in delicate tasks by feeling their way.

The technology would allow people “to project a human-like presence into the robots, to do human-like tasks on the surface” of a planet, development engineer Andre Schiele said.

With engineers hoping at some point to fly people to Mars, “we have to bring them back” which means before they first step foot there, “you would have to build an entire launch-platform on the planet”, he said

Robots like the Centaur – also affectionately dubbed the “blue bug” by some of its designers -- could be put in place first to do the building, with the controllers on a space station. – AFP