When German astronaut and scientist Alexander Gerst arrives at the International Space Station in June, he will bring with him an unusual friend: an intelligent robot that speaks and flies.
Called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, or CIMON, the orb-shaped device weighs about 11 pounds and displays an expressive digital face. His "brain" is driven in part by IBM Watson, the artificial intelligence software that defeated Jeopardy! Champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011 and won $ 1 million. The aircraft manufacturer Airbus helped develop the robot as well.
"In summary, CIMON will be the first flight and mission assistance system based on artificial intelligence," said Manfred Jaumann, Airbus' cargo engineer, in a press release. He added that CIMON will be a "free aviator, a type of flying brain" that will interact, help and learn from astronauts.
CIMON is very far from the HAL 9000 supercomputer of the classic science fiction book and the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", and it is not the only flying robot that goes to the ISS. But CIMON's capabilities are nonetheless impressive.
Training a floating head to be a friend
The robot was created primarily by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which worked in collaboration with IBM, the European Space Agency and other partners.
The CIMON team trained the robot on Earth to recognize Gerst's voice through microphones and his face using cameras. The machine is still using an air propulsion system.
The robot will have a separate version of Watson AI in its memory banks. This means that an Internet connection will not be required, a difficult problem in space, so that CIMON can interpret the data, respond to commands, solve problems and, in general, be a useful little robot.
"It can also serve as an early warning system for technical problems," Airbus said.
Gerst will unpack CIMON in June and use the flying robot until October. During that time, he will help Gerst solve basic problems and mark tasks as a digital assistant. But the main mission of CIMON is to complete three objectives: to experiment with the growth of crystals in space, to solve a Rubik's cube and "to perform a complex medical experiment using CIMON as an 'intelligent' flight camera," according to Airbus.
"Experiments sometimes consist of more than 100 different steps, CIMON knows them all," said Matthias Biniok, Watson's lead architect in Germany, in an IBM blog post.
CIMON will use a neural network to interact and learn from Gerst, at least at the beginning.
Ultimately, CIMON will spy on astronauts from the space station to help assess their emotional states and their psychological "group effects," Biniok said, a feature that could help design trips of months or years to the Moon or Mars.
"The social interaction between people and machines, between astronauts and assistance systems equipped with emotional intelligence, could play an important role in the success of long-term missions," Airbus said.
"We predict that assistance systems of this kind also have a bright future here on earth, such as in hospitals or to support nursing care," Biniok said.
In case you are wondering how close we are to "2001: a space odyssey", there are no astronauts called "Dave" programmed to fly to the space station in the short term, according to NASA.
