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The next shipment to the International Space Station contains nearly three tons of search and re-supply equipment. You know, typical things: sediment studies, a factory thermometer, a replacement hand for the giant robot Canadarm. Oh, and also a floating robot designed to help astronauts – scientifically, logistically and emotionally.
The full name of the bot is Crew Interactive Mobile Companion: Cimon. It looks like one of those spherical pool speakers, if you have replaced the speaker with a screen that displays a line-sketching face that responds. This is not a complete HAL: On this demonstration mission, Cimon is there to help the Station Commander with three very simple tasks that test its utility. But in the longer term, Cimon could also look at and interpret how teammates interact with each other, following the social dynamics that might escape astronauts' manipulators on the ground.
Cimon is a joint project of the European aviation company Airbus and IBM. , funded by the German Space Agency DLR. And its developers hope that astronauts will love working with the bot, that having a pair will de-stress them. But it's complicated – because work buddies do not register you (usually, I hope).
Cimon does not have a body, but he has eye cameras, microphones for the ears and a speaker for the mouth. By using fans as fins, and ultrasonic sensors for proprioception, he is free to move in the microgravity cabin. He can answer human questions and statements in human language, and learn interactions (record, link and analyze). In addition, engineers have endowed it with a personality (ISTJ, they claim). With all this, Cimon's parents hope it will be a good socializer [espionnage].
To give Cimon its intelligence and social skills, Airbus turned to IBM and its Watson AI, which was used for automated, personalized banking. car advertising, and health care – although it has been widely criticized for failing to meet, for example, the promises made to cancer treatment providers. You can think of Watson as a two year old: he understands language and some general things about the world, and if you expose him to data from a given area, he can learn – and learn how to draw conclusions – in this regard.
So, before he was ready for the flight, Cimon needed to learn some spatial things, like jargon. Astronauts, for example, do not say "yes". "If they want to be assertive, they say" affirmative, "" says Matthias Biniok of IBM. "Or the abbreviation" a-cabinet. "What Watson would normally interpret as" a society.
For some of these shortcuts, companies turned to astronaut and space station commander Alexander Gerst, who will be Cimon's chief buddy.On the station, Cimon and Gerst have three to-dos together, the first being an experiment on how crystals form in microgravity.But instead of having to float to and from a floating PDF manual for this study, Gerst may instead ask Cimon about the procedure. "More sophisticated queries like" What kind of tool should I use right now? ", Explains Biniok. "Or, why do I need to use Teflon?"
For their second collaboration, Gerst and Cimon will also try to solve together a cube of Rubik ("Open the doors of the bay, Cimon, so that I can throw this cube on the airlock"). And finally, for a medical experiment, Cimon will act as a mobile video camera, which means that Gerst will not have to mount special loggers on the right views.
There is however an artificial aid that Gerst refused, because he did not want to be watched and analyzed all time. The Cimon artificial brain usually connects to the IBM cloud, transmitting data to Frankfurt. While IBM did not reintroduce ISS data into the broader Watson version, Gerst wanted even stronger security protections. Thus, the team has incorporated a push-button privacy mode that temporarily stops the data from leaving the station. "Of course, you do not want to be monitored all the time," says Philipp Schulien of Airbus. Alone, he continues, "they can feel free to do what they want, to speak freely."
For similar reasons, Gerst vetoed the so-called "tone analyzer" that uses syntax to read the mood. cross Gerst's ship too far. would you have a robot say to a ground station that you seem today filled with existential dread, especially since it might be wrong?
Nevertheless, catching the feelings of astronauts is part of Cimon's long-term goals, which include, according to Airbus, "[examining] the group effects that can develop over a long period into small teams and that can occur during long-term missions. " In other words, spy on the space clique.
Ella Atkins, an aerospace engineer studying astronaut-robot collaboration, does not see Cimon's abilities as a privacy issue. "Sharing the day-to-day experience is supposed," she says. Astronauts do not really have any privacy expectations: there are already cameras everywhere. "That said, if the astronaut does not feel talkative, Cimon can and should recognize when to" leave the astronaut alone for a moment, "Atkins continues," as would a human friend. "
This will have to be tested in real space with real astronauts, and, indeed, the developers are likely to look not only at how humans interact with each other (and their own isolation), but also how they interact with each other. Cimon.
Biniok says the team has imbued the bot with emotional intelligence and compassion. "You can tell Cimon that I miss my family," and Cimon will not answer, "Oh, no "It's very sad," says Biniok. "He'll understand," It's something I can be sympathetic. "He could ask if he should try to talk to the family by video, or do you suggest going out into space, take this new robotic hand and drop it on your own shoulder.
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