In the article “Astrobee Will Find Astronauts' Lost Socks” (Ackerman, 2021), NASA intends to establish a permanent space station called Gateway. Gateway will serve as a transiting point for astronauts who are heading towards Mars. As Gateway is expected to be unoccupied for long periods of time, robots will be utilized to maintain and ensure the viability of Gateway for astronauts. This includes keeping Gateway clean and safe. To do so, NASA has included a battery of tests for prototype robots such as testing their capacity to identify and remove obstacles via signals from computer vision, discern localized areas of the station and engineering communication between them. These tests are part of NASA’s long-term goal to integrate prevailing autonomous systems of the space station and robots to be fully functional without human interventions. In essence, the robots have to effectively respond and react to the signals sent out by the autonomous systems. One such robot that was tested - Bumble, poses a problem for maneuvering around the station due to its limited mobility. Nevertheless, NASA is considering other commissioned robots such as Robonaut 2 and GITAI’s arm to go aboard Gateway.
With NASA utilizing robots to maintain Gateway, the size of Astrobee and its battery lifespan has a significant impact on the efficacy of the work that it can complete.
In the article ‘Astrobee Will Find Astronauts Lost Socks’ (Ackerman, 2021), it was detailed that the robot, Bumble, was designed to be small-sized for it to maneuver around the space station easily. According to Mian (2018), the size of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is relative to its power capacity. This would mean that small robots will have a shorter-spanned battery lifespan due to the size of the battery installed in the robot. With the shorter battery lifespan, there are potential problems that may arise entailing disruptions to its intended missions.
According to Ackerman (2017), the performance of Astrobee will be affected if it is required to return to the charging dock often whilst engaging in certain tasks. For instance, Astrobee is required to complete tasks like taking videos of the crew activities and other housekeeping tasks like surveying the sensors in the space station (Ackerman, 2017). The short battery lifespan may result in the robot not being able to complete a task in one attempt or even producing segmented data which may require more human hours to configure.
Another problem of having a short battery lifespan may result in Astrobee failing to return to its charging dock in time. It was reported that during its trial, Astrobee was often caught in obstacles like tangled cables which required the robot to identify and solve the problem. These higher-level tasks like identifying and solving technical issues are unprecedented problems that will consume the limited power capacity that Astrobee has. In such cases, Ackerman (2019) reckons that astronauts will have to be deployed to assist the robot. Hence, the battery lifespan of Astrobee may diminish its efficiency in the long term.
According to Main (2018), power problems are usually solved by installing a bigger battery unit into the robots. However, this would defeat the purpose of Bumble’s design as a compact and robust robot. To counter this problem, a possible solution is to replace the current lithium-ion batteries with Graphene Aluminum-Ion [GAI] batteries (Ackerman, 2019). According to Taylor (2021), GAI batteries are able to “charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium ion cells and hold three times the energy of the best aluminum based cells” (para. 2). Using GAI batteries will not only provide Astrobee with three times longer lifespan to maneuver around the space station and complete its tasks but also reduce the safety issues posed by using lithium-ion batteries which are flammable when overused (Jhaveri, 2020).
However, Astrobee still has the potential of easing the job of astronauts in space. According to Kanis (2022), Astrobee has the ability to take over regular chores to help free up time for astronauts to work on issues that require human intervention. Allowing multiple robots cohesively working together in a common system, it enables them to share the information. With that, the robots would be able to work more effectively on the tasks and maintaining the unmanned space station (Figliozzi, 2019).
In conclusion, I have shown the limitations of Astrobee based on its size and battery lifespan and the potential problems the robot may face. I I believe that Astrobee’s potential can be maximized by improving its battery lifespan and one plausible method would be to change the type of battery used by Astrobee which will ultimately increase its efficiency.
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References
Ackerman, E. (2017). How NASA’s Astrobee robot is bringing useful autonomy to the ISS. IEEE
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Ackerman, E. (2019). NASA launching Astrobee robots to space station. IEEE Spectrum.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-launching-astrobee-robots-to-iss-tomorrow
Ackerman, E. (2021). Astrobee will find astronaut’s lost socks. IEEE Spectrum.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/astrobee-nasa-gateway
Figliozzi, G. (2019). Hi Honey! NASA’s Second Astrobee Wakes Up in Space. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/ames/hi-honey-nasa-s-second-astrobee-wakes-up-in-space
Jhaveri, J. (2020). Battery safety: Top 5 reasons why lithium-ion batteries catch fire. ION
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Kanis, S. (2022). What is Astrobee?. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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Taylor, M. (2021). Developer of aluminum-ion battery claims it charges 60 times faster than
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