October 1st 2002 - Open in New Window

Scott Askew: Welcome to the fourth robotics webcast. My name is Scott Askew. I work on the Robonaut project on the avionics lead. Some people may not know what that is, but that's the electronics, to use a fancy word in the space program. Okay, so before I talk about Robonaut in depth, I wanted to just give you a little more overvaw. You all have seen a lot of about robotics in the last few presentations, but I'm going to give you my spin on it. On slide 2 I'll give you the overview of the presentation. I'll talk about some types of space robots, then I'm going to go into Robonaut, give the objectives and the latest advances we've made; I'll talk about the different anatomy of Robonaut or the different body parts we have. Some of the experiments we've done with Robonaut in the past couple years, and how Robonaut interacts with humans. That's one of the unique features of it is that it directly interfaces with humans. And then I'll talk about some possible future applications for Robonaut. Okay?
So moving to slide 3, different types of space robots. I've drawn up probably half a dozen different types here, and that's certainly not comprehensive, but it covers most of them. Bev planetary probes like the one I've shown here, the Mars Global Surveyor. There's plenty others that you're probably going to hear about or have already heard about. Planetary rovers, large payload handlers, free flier inspectors, maintenance robots, and also astronaut assistance. And that category is what Robonaut fits in. The most famous rover that you all are probably familiar with is Sojourner, and I have that on slide 4. Basically they move around on planetary surfaces. And the big thing that distinguishes them from the planetary probes, which basically are transported through space. Sometimes a probe carries a rover, sometimes it doesn't.
On slide 5, this covers the large payload type handling robot, and the best example of that is the shuttle remote manipulator system, or RMS. It has about a 50-foot reach, and it picks up payloads several thousand pounds that -- it can barely pickets own weight up on earth, but in space it can pick up several thousand pounds of mass and transport that.
And also, if you can see in this picture -- I'm not sure how well you can see it on your screen -- but in this picture, the shuttle RMS is actually carrying humans and that's one of the things it does a lot is it moves humans from place to place. So they'll climb onto its end and catch a ride from one end of the space shuttle to the other.
Let's see. The next type I've listed is the free flier inspection robot, and you all got an overview of the AERCam project last week, so I won't talk about that too much, but that is a new class of robot that we've been developing over the past few years.
The next category is -- and that's on slide 7 -- is the maintenance robot. And the main purpose of our maintenance robot is to take away -- take off some of the drudge work from astronauts so they can do some of the science that we want to do up in space.
In the picture I've shown, the Canadian space station maintenance robot called the special purpose dextrous manipulator. That will be up in space in another year or so and it will do some of the routine maintenance tasks so astronauts won't have to. It will still be operated by astronauts but they won't have to put on their space suits and go outside, so it will help them.
Now I come to my final category of space robots, and that's what I call the astronaut assistant. And Robonaut is in development and it's a future robot that will fly in space and help humans directly and indirectly.
Okay, now I'm on slide 9. I'm going to give you some of the background of why we decided to build Robonaut. NASA has a big investment and reliance on EVA, or extra-vehicular activity, and that's humans that put on space suits and go outside to do work, and we have thousands and thousands of hours invested of this, lots of tools, lots of special fixtures that astronauts have to deal with. And there are many tasks that are not well suited for robots, such as the maintenance robot I showed you. So having a robot that can work with the same types of interfaces in space that humans can is very important. Okay, so let me go to slide number 10. And Robonaut, the objective of Robonaut was to develop a space robot with dextrous capability exceeding that of a suited astronaut.
The different roles that Robonaut can take is as an astronaut assistant, so it can be in space working with an astronaut. It can also be outside all the time so it can be on call. For an astronaut to get into his or her space suit takes many hours, about a day of preparation to get ready for an EVA. So Robonaut could be sitting outside ready to go if there's any need to go look at something or do a task very quickly.
And the last thing I've written is that Robonaut is actually what we call a virtual surrogate to other worlds. Because of the way humans interface with it, we feel our presence to Robonaut, and so for the human that controls Robonaut, they feel that they are there. And that's what we call telepresence. And I hope you all have heard about that. I'll talk about that a little more in the end of the presentation.
I've got a short video that I want you all to watch, and then we'll continue on with some of the details of Robonaut.
Video: In classic science fiction, authors and artists dreamed of an age where humans would work side by side with robots, mechanical helpers that were so advanced they resembled their human creators. Is that age so far away? At the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, engineers have taken the next step in robotics. This is Robonaut, and it's not only changing the way people think about robots, it's making yesterday's science fiction a reality. Robonaut is a teleoperated robot, meaning that a human operator can control its movements from a distance. The teleoperator wears a head-mounted display to both control the head of the robot and to see what the robot sees. The binocular video on the helmet's display give a sense of depth and work-site immersion. A position sincive glove controls the movements of the intricate Robonaut arm and hand which replicates the capabilities of a human arm and hand.
The human aspect of the robot hand gives the Robonaut great potential to be an assistant to astronauts working in space. The current hand has 12 individual controlled motions or degrees of freedom divided into two sections. The first two fingers and the thumb make up the dextrous work side. They have three degrees of freedom. They can open and close, as well as spread apart, essentially like human fingers.
The remaining two fingers only open and close. They are used for grasping. The palm can cup to help grasp tools.
With over 100 sensors in the arm, the manipulator has a fine motion capability that equals its great strength. The arm's one to one strength to weight ratio is unequaled in the commercial manipulator world, allowing for the portable and mobile applications that Robonaut faces. The endoskeleton is designed with custom space lubricants and materials to meet the extremes of the space environment and is covered with a novel skin that will protect the arm and help make it safe for its role as a human assistant.
The two arms can work together to perform more complex tasks, to hold large objects using both hands, or to stabilize and work on objects simultaneously.
Robonaut's upper body is mounted on a three-degree-of-freedom waist, allowing full orientation of roll, yaw, and pitch motion. This articulation of the torso allows the robot to extend its reach and position its dextrous pair of arms for efficient work site operations.
With a range of motion greater than that of even a human gymnast, this waist can rotate fully around, repositioning the arms for work and the head for inspections. The head, still in development, houses stereo vision cameras that are pointed by an articulated neck. As the operator moves his head, Robonaut's eyes are pointed to mimic the human's gaze with the binocular video on the helmet's displays which gives a sense of depth and VR motion. The head contains an additional care of cameras with auxiliary angles and LEDs that illuminate the site in low lighting conditions. Robonaut's design could be ideal for helping astronauts because for the first time humans and robots can share the same space-walking tools. From this power drill, used to represent the space torque wrench typically used to loosen or tighten bolts on space hardware, to tethers designed for human hands which are used by astronauts to connect themselves to a spacecraft. And Velcro strips used to attach thermal blankets and insulation covers.
Construction is underway on the international space station, the largest space structure ever built. The space shuttle robot arm has been invaluable in helping astronauts to move the giant pieces of the station together and maneuver spacewalkers to their work sites. The space station will have its own robotic system designed to help build and maintain the giant structure.
Robonaut has the potential to expand the role of robots as helpers during routine maintenance tasks on the space station. The robot could be used to set up a work site for the astronaut, installing food restraints, for example, saving valuable time before the complex spacewalk actually begins.
As the astronaut works on the station, the Robonaut could act as an assistant, much the same way a nurse works with a doctor, or, if desire, the robot could perform some of the maintenance tasks on its own by being teleoperated by an IVA astronaut.
When the spacewalk is complete, Robonaut could stow away the same equipment it set up earlier, freeing the EVA astronaut to perform more important duties. Robonaut has applications not only in the maintenance of spacecraft, but also in the exploration of other worlds. The Robonaut torso could possibly be combined with a rover, allowing travel across the rough terrain of other planets. Imagine the ability for a geologist to survey Mars through the eyes of the robot, then use its hands to scoop up soil, or even pick up a rock, inspect it, and add it to a collection for return to earth.
In the future, the same Robonaut technology that helps explore space could also have some very down-to-earth applications. Robonaut's sophisticated hands can work with treesers, pipettes and a number of other common hand-held tools that could used for a host of telescience applications. Whether the robot works on its own or just lends a helping hand the uses of the Robonaut are limited only by the imagination of its user. No longer reserved for the pages of science fiction, Robonaut represents technology that is working today, with far-reaching applications in the future, both in space and here on earth.
Scott Askew: Okay, that was the Robonaut video. We made that about a year and a half ago, so there's a few things in there that I will update you on as I go through. Now we're going to slide 12. I'm going to talk a little bit on the next couple slides about the evolution and progress of Robonaut and where it stands today. On slide number 12, I show a four-phase progression between 1998 and the fall of 2001. We're in the fall of 2002, which I'll cover in the next slide. We started with just one hand and one arm, and they were both separate in the first year. We then added the arm -- we built the arm and hand together, and we added the head so a human could control Robonaut. The next year we added the upper torso which included both arms, both hands, the head, and then the new mobility was the waist, or the ability to move your upper body. So Robonaut can now reach out and touch someone a lot easier than it could before. In 2001, some of the advances we made were in the body, adding skins and a body shell, and also starting to work on some autonomy or giving robot some intelligence, and I'll talk about that a little bit more in 2000 -- or in the next slide. So in slide 12 you're going to have to help me a little bit. My printout didn't work too well but I'm going to read through some of the things. We talk about Robonaut's anatomy very similar to that of humans, so when we say Robonaut now has a mouth, that means we have voice synthesis or a computer generated voice that Robonaut can speech to humans with, and interact, and so when Robonaut has different things it needs to say it uses its mouth or voice synthesis.
Robonaut has ears, or voice recognition so it can understand certain phrases from humans and operators can tell it different tasks they want it to do or different modes of operation they want Robonaut to be in.
. The eyes, we added new cameras and we aided a stereo verge mechanism which allows the eyes to point in and out. And the importance of that is is that it allows you to see stereo in different places, so I can look at my hand close or I can look at something far across the room by merging my eyes in and out.
Let's see. We added the carbon fiber shell, the body in the backpack, and then we added a memory function to Robonaut so Robonaut had some idea of what things it saw and recognized in its work space, and keeps track of those. I think I'll go on to the next slide, because it talks about -- and then the next slide basically covers some of the some of the autonomy functions. So Robonaut can now take a command from a human to find a wrench, grab a wrench, hand the wrench to the human, and then release it. Robonaut can also look at a series of several different tools, several different objects and recognize a specific one and retreat that tool, and so it can also track objects in space. So if I have something and I'm moving it or it's moving it on its own, then Robonaut can recognize that and track that object. So those are three big things that allow Robonaut to do tasks more on its own, not requiring a human, like you saw in the video, to do all its operations. So one of the things Robonaut is doing is moving from a purely teleoperated robot to an autonomous or mixed-mode autonomous robot.
Now I'm going to go through some of the anatomy, moving on to slides 15 through about 20 or 21. Most of this you've seen in the video. I'll try to add new information so I'm not just covering the same things you've already seen.
On slide 16 we have the hand. Robonaut is unique. It's a five-fingered robot hand. It's the most human-like robot hand in the world. I won't say it's the most dextrous, but it's the most human-like and that gives it quite a dextrous capability. There's a lot of sensors in the hand that tell Robonaut where its hand positions are, how hard it's grasping something, and we've recently added gloves which have tactile sensors and so Robonaut has a sense of touch now when it's actually holding objects. It knows both contact and force of the objects it grabs.
Okay, so slide 17 we have the Robonaut arm, and one of the differences between when we talk about the hand and the arm, the hand module includes the wrist, and so the two degrees of freedom in the wrist, the pitch and the yaw -- hope you can see pitch and yaw -- are built into the wrist. For control purposes, that's part of the arm, but as a mechanism it's part of the hand. So the arm has five degrees of freedom in the upper arm, and then with the wrist it's seven degrees of freedom.
Its strength is one-to-one, which is pretty unique. It actually has a lot more sensors than the hand. It has some redundant sensors and it also has temperature sensors to give it a sense of how warm things are.
Let's see. Okay, so slide 18 talks about the waist, and that's probably the most recent, big new capability we've given to Robonaut is the ability to move its waist or torso, and there's three degrees of freedom in the waist. Starts with a base roll -- this is roll -- and then pitch, so it can pitch forward, and it can actually also turn its upper body this way, so it's got a third roll at the top.
It has to have a lot of strength because it carries the full load of the Robonaut upper body, and it has a large range of motion.
Let's see. That was in the video, so I'm repeating myself. Slide 19 is the torso, the carbon fiber shell and skins that were added to Robonaut, and that's mainly a protective cover for Robonaut and to keep it protected and the environment protected from Robonaut, so there's no exposed metal surfaces.
The Robonaut head and neck on slide 20 is just two degrees of freedom. We call this the "yes" motor, and that's the "no" motor. So a roll and a pitch, and it has no cameras -- actually, Robonaut currently has four cameras in the head. Two look at things close up, and they have the verge mechanism which allows it to change its stereo focus. And then there's also a second set of cameras which have a large field of view so if for some reason the operator wants to switch the view, they can switch to the second set of cameras. So that's one thing that humans can't do is change their -- change their camera view, and the verge cameras can also zoom in and out. So kind of like the six-million-dollar man, if you all are that old or have seen those reruns, is the ability to zoom in and get a very close lookup. If I wanted to look at my finger very close I don't have to put my finger right here, I can look here and zoom my cameras in.
And the most interesting thing is all the parts of Robonaut are directly controlled by human motion. So if the human wears a helmet with a sensor, the human's head makes the Robonaut's motion move.
Okay, I guess I covered the eyes on slide 21 already as a part of the head. So I won't say too much else about that.
Now, stereo vision, which is part of the computer intelligence that allows Robonaut to recognize and track objects is a new part of the anatomy, and we've just added that. We've also added an infrared camera which allows Robonaut to look at something and tell its temperature. We call that the nose, but it's really a temperature sensor.
Now, on slide 23 the Robonaut memory is a collaborative capability that's been added by working with the University of Vanderbilt and some of their professors and graduate students, and this capability represents the function of the Hippocampus in the human. Basically spatial relations of objects to ourselves. I have a friend with a young child, and at the age between one and two, children start to distinguish objects and remember that objects exist and they're the same place where they saw them last time, so they have a memory of objects, and that's what Robonaut is developing, the ability to recognize an object, remember where it was, and just like people who get older has -- the longer it was since you saw that object, the more it fades from memory so it has sort of a time lag that if the object was there yesterday, I think it's probably still there, but if it was two months ago, well, it may or may not be there.
Let's see. And that's an ongoing area of research. A lot of the work that's going on right now with Robonaut is working with universities to add some of the intelligence capabilities so it can do more autonomous functions.
Okay, now moving on to the next set of slides, 24 through 29 or so, I'll talk about some of the experiments we've done in 2001 and a little bit in 2002, but mostly in 2001 we did many, many experiments with Robonaut for different types of activities.
Okay, for in-space operations one of the things Robonaut needs to be able to do is to be able to climb around. You saw in the video a computer animation of Robonaut climbing around simulated space station. Well, we built a mockup for Robonaut to climb around on and see how well it could maneuver through a part of a space station object. And we did some work while we were doing that. We ran cables and connected -- mated connectors. And this was actually compared to astronauts doing the same tasks. So part of the it is getting a baseline for how Robonaut does the task compared to humans. And obviously it's not as fast as a human, but a suited astronaut is not nearly as fast as you are or I, so they have a lot of gear that slows them down considerably, too.
So to make Robonaut as good as a suited astronaut is easier than making Robonaut as good as a human just here on earth.
Okay, and the next experiment we looked at was the planetary geology experiment. You saw in the video Robonaut scooping up and picking up rocks. Well, that's a little staged. One of the things that they need to do to analyze rocks is they need to crack them. So Robonaut picked up rocks and inserted them into a rock cracker, cracked the rock, and then picked the rock up for inspection. And if further analysis were needed on that, it could have continued on analyzing that. So that was part of the geology experiment was to basically allow Robonaut to do some of the same things that a planetary or field geologist would do trying to understand the geology of a different terrain here on earth or another planet. It's very similar, actually.
Okay, so slide 27, now I get into some of the autonomy, and I've covered this so I won't do too much of it, but one of the things to mention is the functions that we had to create or develop to allow -- to give Robonaut some of this autonomy. So the vision I've mentioned. The brain stem is kind of what we call our core control, or the ability to do motor control, sensory motor control, the ability to reach, know where your hands and arms are. And then the cerebellum and the memory are some of those lower-level brain functions that allow Robonaut to start recognizing task-level commands.
And working with humans was a big thing because all those capabilities are needed to allow it to both recognize human commands or even gestures. An astronaut might point to something and Robonaut needs to understand what that gesture means, so gesture recognition is as important as voice recognition, and there's been a lot of work from our group in understanding how to do gestures.
And also that knowing -- if you've got a tool and you want to give it to someone, you have to understand when that person is ready to take it. And so there's a little bit of understanding the forces of hand-off to be able to do that.
One of the things we did -- now I'll move on to slide 28 -- we did human interface experiments, because Robonaut has been primarily controlled by humans, how humans interact with it or how humans experience controlling Robonaut is very important, and how we can improve that has been an ongoing area of research that we continue today. And so we had four different experiments, three of which we're doing direct studies on how humans interact with Robonaut from the control aspect. Jen Rochlis did her Ph.D. dissertation, and she's now actually a NASA employee. She's looking at how visual information changes the ability to control Robonaut. And so she changed the visual perception, added some -- added information and took it away and studied it in four different modes and looked at what helped operators improve control.
Now, we had two people that did force-feed back, and that's actually one of the things that is key, because from the time Robonaut's been built, the operator only has visual feedback. The only way they know what's happening is by seeing what's in the world. And so even though Robonaut has a sense of touch, that information is not fed back to the human, so if I reach out and touch something, I only see that I touch it, I don't really know exactly how hard I'm touching and that's an important feature we're trying to add to the operator's environment. So it really does feel like you're part of Robonaut, and the things Robonaut experiences you experience, too. So we did two force feedback experiences. One was force feedback on the arm level, and so as the operator moved Robonaut's arm, they would feel forces coming back, and the other one had both a force feedback joystick and a force feedback glove or what we call a tactile display glove, which sends some signals back to a human. It's not exactly like experiencing force when you touch something, but it's the best we can do with today's technology or with affordable technology. Many of the things we do on Robonaut has to be affordable. Some of the mechanisms we built custom, but a lot of the things we use for control we buy off the shelf, so a lot of the hardware you see is virtual reality gear that's developed for virtual reality games or computer simulations of different types.
Okay, so that's all I'm going to talk about for human interface experiments. We'll move on to slide 29, and that will be the last experiment.
So the next thing about Robonaut is it can now be part of a human Robonaut team, so the interaction with humans becomes key, and I've mentioned that before, so we actually conducted several different experiments where Robonaut worked with a human to do a task, and you see the tool task, which I've talked about. But the next task was actually assembling a flexible beam and holding a flexible beam in a particular position and then working with the other operator -- or the other person to complete this task. And so our operator would talk to Robonaut, and the microphone went directly to the teleoperator, who then understood what to do and performed the tasks, rather than Robonaut being able to recognize everything the operator was saying, the audio just went straight to Robonaut's teleoperator. And that was also compared to just two humans interacting and how well that works and the amount of resources it takes to have one robot and one human versus two humans or two robots, because humans take up a lot of resources, and so do -- robots take up a certain amount, but the main thing is robots are expendable, and we can put them in environments where it's more dangerous, and if they come into danger or they are damaged, it's less consequences than if the human does. So that's one of the key reasons that Robonaut is important is it can do very dangerous tasks, and hopefully do them as well as humans can.
Now from slide 29 to the next few slides I'm going to talk about different modes of human-robot interaction. So I'm kind of leading to how Robonaut interacts with humans.
And so on slide 30, we have several different levels of intervention, and that is, if you think about what mode the robot is in. So the robot can be purely teleoperated, which means the human controls all the motions; it can be in a supervised autonomy mode, which means some of the things the human will do directly, some of the things the human will command Robonaut to do. And the human gets to decide when to go back and forth. And so you're supervising the task. When you need to directly intervene, the operator goes in and actually can command a specific motion to complete a task that maybe Robonaut is having difficulty with.
And then the final level would be the autonomous mode in which you basically give Robonaut a task to do, and there's no operator that's going to intervene to do tasks, but you're basically just letting it go on its way. You're always going to have to monitor it, just like if an astronaut is out in an EVA suit, there's always someone outside monitoring the astronaut. So robots don't just get left alone, there's always some monitoring; maybe it's once a day; maybe it's, you know, once a minute. But you definitely are going to always keep some eye on it.
Now I'll talk about the different types of communication. I talked about you have to be able to understand voice, the gestures I talked about. Excuse me. I'm not used to talking so long. I work in a lab most of the day.
Okay, there's different ways the human can command the robot, through force feedback devices or just telepresence setups you've seen.
And then the physical connections is, is how close is the human robot interaction. So are they right next to each other working? Are they working in different areas and they're helping each other, or -- the coordinated contact is they have to check in fairly regularly.
Now, slide 31 talks of how -- three slides on what's called agent interaction, and that talks a little bit about humans interact with Robonaut either through the control or through working with Robonaut. So slide 31, the agent interaction is teleoperation. The human is in charge of the task through Robonaut -- there's one human in charge of the task through Robonaut, and all things basically get done in that mode.
The next slide, slide 32, is Robonaut is an autonomous system, so the only human in the loop is one that gives robe the command and may or may not take a tool from its hand or work with it. But the operator gives Robonaut a command and lets it execute the command. It doesn't do the task.
And so slide 33 basically shows that mixed mode where there's a teleoperator in the loom and there's a human in the work space too. So Robonaut is working with a human and the human is controlling Robonaut and that human can be directly controlling it or it can be doing some mixed mode autonomy or giving it some high level tasks to do. So there's actually many different ways Robonaut interacts with humans and humans interacts with Robonaut. And that's been an exciting area of work over the last probably six to nine months. Now I'm going to cover -- and some of this you've seen it in the video, but I'll talk about some of the future applications of Robonaut and why we actually -- how we started building Robonaut and different modes we might use it in.
So slide 35 shows a picture of Robonaut, and this is what we call our anatomy for zero-g work. This is how we envision that Robonaut would be built and work on let's say a space station. When we originally started working on Robonaut, we were very focused that Robonaut would be an assistant to astronauts on the space station. And so we've built some of the capabilities with that in mind. And in fact we are building -- if you look at the anatomy that is on this slide, we're building a second Robonaut that will look very much like this, and so in the next few months, you may see pictures on the web site that show this new Robonaut that has -- the main feature is is it now has a stabilizing leg that allows it to attach itself and stabilize itself to different locations, just like astronauts in space, they -- there's no force to react off of. So if they need to work, they put their feet in a foot restraint and they basically kind of lock their boots in, and that keeps their lower body stable while they're doing work with their upper body.
And so Robonaut will use this stabilizing leg to allow it to attach different locations and do work with its upper body, which is the dextrous part, the part that allows it to do many different things rather than one thing specifically.
And that's one thing I didn't mention earlier, but that's another aspect of Robonaut. What's unique is it's very flexible. It can do different things. It doesn't just do one thing very well; it does many things pretty good. So that was a big goal for us to have a robot that could do a wide range of activities, and that's what allows it to have so many possible future applications.
Even though we decide -- when we began designing it, it was for the space station, there's now many different applications that Robonaut can be used for, because it's so versatile and flexible.
So the zero-g slide is what we're working towards now, and you should see some pictures on the web site very soon.
So now I'll talk about some of the different mobility modes that Robonaut might have on a space station, or on a spacecraft or on, you know, different space vehicles.
Slide 36 shows crane mobility, and that's very similar to the slide I showed earlier of the shuttle RMS, remote manipulator system, moving humans around. So that could just as easily pick Robonaut up and move it to a location to do work, and then Robonaut would do the work, and then the crane could move it back. So that's a -- that's an easy thing, and if -- I don't know how easy you can flip back and forth on slides, but one of the things I didn't mention on slide 35, the zero-g anatomy is Robonaut has this big stinger on its back in the middle of its back, and that's where the RMS can pick it up.
And so basically it's a probe that the large crane Robonaut reaches and grabs Robonaut and moves it around. So that's one of the features we added for the zero-g configuration.
Okay, one of the things about Robonaut is picking the Robonaut up in -- on earth in 1 G is a lot more difficult than picking up in zero G. We don't have an exact weight, but the Robonaut that we're building now will probably weigh a few hundred pounds. And a dextrous robot picking up something that heavy is not that common. And the large crane robots that we have on earth that astronauts use to train, most of those pick up very lightweight, helium-filled balloons or lightweight aluminum structures, not very heavy things, certainly not as heavy as Robonaut.
Okay, now the free flier, slide 37, is another mode that Robonaut could take on, if it needs to go more than, say, 50 feet or however long a crane-side robot arm could carry it. The free flier mobility would allow it to go hundreds or thousands of feet, and it could possibly go between two types of spacecraft, or it could fly around something like the space station, which has, you know, several-hundred-foot trusses. And there's several configurations here. These are all just shown for artistic purposes or creative genius, I'm not sure which. The one on the bottom left, which says "safer rocket pack," the "safer" is actually a piece of equipment that all astronauts wear now, and it's a little backpack that, should they ever become detached from their spacecraft while they're on an EVA, they can turn this little backpack, jet pack, on, and it will propel them back to the spacecraft. So "safer" is a real piece of hardware, and it could potentially be reconfigured to strap onto Robonaut and Robonaut could fly around.
And the other two are purely imaginative tasks that one of our designers came up with that Robonaut might use to fly around in.
And so the big thing is that this now gives it much more mobility than a crane-type operator would. But it's also harder to build. So those are the tradeoffs.
The next two slides show Robonaut on a planetary rover. One of them, the slide 38, basically takes a rover that's been built at Carnegie-Mellon University, and then this is all just digital imaging, shows how Robonaut could be attached to the front of that. So that's showing a practical application that could happen in the next year or two, let's say, if it was decided we wanted to put Robonaut on a rover, we could actually do that, and this rover is used in various field experiments in remote places of the world right now. And so Robonaut could go do experiments there on this rover.
Slide 39 is yet another artist's concept of different ways the Robonaut could be configured, and this is one of our favorites, which is the Centaur configuration in which, just like the mythical figure, the upper body is that of a human, and the lower body, rather than being a horse or a goat or some other beast, is sort of a funky rover, and then it's got this tail on it that is yet another robot, or an extension of Robonaut.
So it starts to become a robotic system, not just a humanoid robot. It's got a lot of different capabilities.
And that's something that would probably take, you know, ten or 20 years for us to build and have a robot system ready to go for -- well, if we wanted to do it soon, we could, but nobody wants to pay that much money. So that's not likely to happen any time soon.
Another thing that could happen soon is I'm sure you you all have seen something that had a lot of publicity and hype in the last year, and it was called Ginger, and IT, and now it's officially come out and it's called the Segue. If you look on slide 40, what you'll see is a photo shop rendition of how Robonaut could be interfaced with a segue and give Robonaut some mobility here on earth, and of course this is a quick artist's concept that was part of the a proposal we put forward, but it shows you that there are many different ways Robonaut -- Robonaut doesn't have to have legs if it were going to be on earth. It could -- certainly if humans could have developed wheels for transportation, they probably would have. Most people, once they get a bicycle or a car they don't go back to walking except for exercise or just pure enjoyment. But for transportation efficiency, wheels really work well, so it makes sense to put Robonaut on some sort of wheeled vehicle rather than trying to develop bipedal motion not the most efficient way to propel one's self. And so that's one of the latest ideas that we've come up with for how we can use Robonaut in a mobile application where it won't be fixed in the lab and it can actually go out and interact in the world and do many more things.
Now, I see that -- I'm going through my slides faster than I thought and they thought I'd never get through them this fast, so the last slide, slide 42, is a picture of the Robonaut team, and this picture was taken probably in the summer of 2001. Every summer we have a lot of visiting faculty, students, and the like, and we like to encapsulate those people. And so we've got two or three different years' worth of summer pictures of the Robonaut team. And the Robonaut team is changing all the time. Sometimes, like in these pictures, it's fairly large. And these are people that work with Robonaut on a daily basis, or they work on some aspect of it.
Over the years, since we started this project in 1998, there have been about five or six people that have been on the project the whole time, and those are our core people that began the project, and they sort of brought the vision forward. But we're always adding new team members because there's always new skills that we need to acquire, and so we work with universities, we work with other companies, we work with basically anybody that has technology that will help Robonaut become a better Robonaut. And we're always expanding that.
And if you look in this picture, you'll see a lot of young faces, and that's one of the things we really focus on is getting new people, giving them big challenges, and letting them perform in this environment. And so a lot of the -- a lot of the pieces on Robonaut have been built by young engineers either in college or recent college graduates, and there's a lot of summer jobs in different areas of the space station program, not just on Robonaut.
Well, that concludes my talk, and I think we can start the questions or whatever -- I'm not in charge of this phase, so whoever is can let us know what to do.
Q&A
NASA Moderator: Okay, thanks a lot, Scott. We've got quite a few good questions coming into the chat room. Let's start with Denny says "when will Robonaut be ready for use in space?"
Scott Askew: Well, now, I can't answer that because that's one of the questions on the quiz. No, actually the question on the quiz was when Robonaut -- or humanoid robots be flying or be available on earth. When will Robonaut fly in space is a very good question, and when we started this project in 1998, we thought we would fly it by 2000 or 2001. And now in 2002, we're probably thinking maybe we'll fly it in the next two or three years. Part of it depends on somebody wanting to fly it rather than just have it as an experimental robot. Probably it will fly in the next few years as a one-time experiment, and based on that one-time experiment, if it's successful or depending on what we learn then it could be developed into a full-time robot in space. And that would probably take another four or five years.
So, for Robonaut to be working every day in space might not be until, say, the latter half of this decade. But that really depends on whether or not it's funded. And right now there is no flight funding for it. It's a technology development and demonstration project. We're working on a flight.
NASA Moderator: Pernos wants to know how many people did it take to build the project?
Scott Askew: You guys are asking all the questions that are on the quiz. I alluded on that in my last slide that there are a core team of about half a dozen people that have been on the project since it started in the late nineties, but since that time, there have been literally hundreds of people that have contributed in one way or the other. And the types of people that work on robot are engineers, technicians, machinists, college students, professors, a whole variety of people. We have so much assistance from people that aren't engineers because there's lots of things that have to be done that we need. And so those are part of our team, too. And so it's not just engineers and machinists that build Robonaut. It's the whole support structure we have. So there's hundreds of people.
And like I said, we buy technology when we can, if there's something we can use for Robonaut that will work, we will buy it from a company. We've got lots of hardware and software from commercial companies that sell things every day.
One example of that is the -- I hope I get this right -- the voice synthesis is made by IBM. It's called Via Voice. You can buy it in any computer store. And so that's something that they have spent probably, you know, thousands and thousands of hours and probably millions of dollars developing, and now we're paying a hundred dollars for that. So we're getting that technology for free. The things that we develop are things that other people haven't, the robotic hands, the robotic arms, a lot of the sensor technology, we spent a lot of hours developing those, and hopefully those will be carried on into future robots.
So I hope I didn't answer that too clearly because that's part of your quiz.
NASA Moderator: Okay, fine. I have a couple of people, actually several people, asking questions about the power supply, battery life, fuel source, et cetera, of the Robonaut. So I guess if we could answer RHS and Brian what kind of fuel source does it have, and what's the power supply and battery life.
Scott Askew: Okay. Well, that's a very good question, and right now, since Robonaut is in a laboratory environment, it runs off A/C power from the wall, and we have power supplies that convert the A/C power into D/C which then run the computers and then provide power to the motors and other things on Robonaut. Altogether, right now, Robonaut probably -- or at least the Robonaut that you've seen in the video and in most of these slides would run probably three to 400 watts of power when everything is up and running. And it doesn't take a lot of power to run the motors in the arms and hands and the torso. So all that together -- the computers take up, actually, quite a bit. The computers and a lot of the different -- you lose power when you go from A/C to D/C and then when you go from, say, 60 volts D/C to 30 volts you lose some, so there's a lot of power losses along the way. So all told, I'd say three to four hundred watts. The version that we're building now as represented by the zero G configuration, that one will consume more power because that stabilizing leg actually takes a lot more power than the one we have now. The one thing about that version is is it will be battery operated. And we haven't designed and built the batteries yet, so I can't tell you exactly how much, but I will tell you that we have -- we have conservatively, very conservatively estimated that this Robonaut would consume a little over a thousand watts.
And so that's about like a toaster, something like that. So it doesn't get real hot, but it does a lot of motions.
So in the next year or two, we'll actually add a battery pack to this new Robonaut, and you can go to our web site and you can find out how big the battery is and how long it lasts.
But part of about how big the battery is is how long do you want it to last. And so one of the reasons we haven't built a battery is we don't have a specific mission. We don't have an environment that Robonaut needs to operate in for an extended period of time. If it were going to be on a Martian surface, it might be one thing. If it were going to be on the space station, it might be a different thing. So the types of batteries that Robonaut would have would really depend on where we were going to use it, how we were going to use it, how long we were going to use it. So those things are things we'll learn over the next couple of years with this new mobile version of Robonaut that we can take and start to get some of that information. Okay?
NASA Moderator: Okay. We've got a couple of questions here that relate to the Robonaut's ability to handle things. Chris asked earlier, "What method would be used to sense pressure in the Robonaut hand?" And then John has just asked, "Is Robonaut able to handle objects as fragile as an egg without breaking them, or will it only be able to handle tools and other strong equipment?"
Scott Askew: Actually, Robonaut probably does better with eggs than very strong objects, because the force that Robonaut has in its hands can break an egg, but it's not -- it's not as strong as a big human. Probably about as strong as some of your brothers and sisters. No, the little brothers and sisters. The Robonaut's finger force is designed to be five pounds for each finger, and so if you add those up, you can come up with a combined 20-pound grip strength, if you're reacting the force against your hand. So the four fingers curling into your palm would give you 20 pounds of grip strength, and then you'd curl your thumb over.
So it's not a really, really strong robot.
The thing about humans that's amazing is we have a very high peak loading. So we can do -- we can be really strong for a very short period of time, but our muscles fatigue, and then we get tired and then we can't do the task very much longer. So humans are able to do -- have great -- tremendous strength for short periods of time, whereas Robonaut will have a reasonable amount of strength for a very long period of time. So it's a more steady robot than a really, really strong robot to do high force tasks. But, yes, we can handle soft objects, delicate objects such as eggs. We probably need to do a video demonstrating that. We've just been afraid to get the egg yolks all over our fingers.
Now, I don't know if the video showed Robonaut wearing gloves, but Robonaut does have some gloves now, and so maybe with these gloves now we'll do experiments with eggs and actually demonstrate how we can handle eggs and not crack them until we actually want to.
Let's see. There was another question in there about sensors or something. Can you repeat that part?
NASA Moderator: Let me get back here. Chris asked, "What method would be used to sense pressure in the robot hand?"
Scott Askew: Okay, now, I'll talk about two things. One is how the robot senses forces, and the other one is how we send that information to a human and allow the human to sense the force. And those are two completely different things.
There's a lot of different ways that Robonaut can sense force or contact or pressure, depending on how we do it.
When you -- I don't know how many of you have digital scales, but if you have a scale that's not an analog meter, those scales have what's called load sensors in them, and they're little devices that measure force, which is on earth, that's your weight, but if we have force in the fingers, we can have load cells that measure the force in the fingers, and that's pretty common technology.
The other thing we've done is we've added the tactile sensing. We've had pads in the fingers that actually measure the amount of contact force in different locations. And that's the nice thing, they give you position, tell you where you have contact, whereas the force sensors just tell you how much each finger is exerting on itself or on another part of the environment. Those are the types of sensors the robots need to know force. Now, to get that back to the human is a different thing. Lots of different methods have been attempted, from using pressure bladders to create pressure on the finger, to vibrating motors to give you sort of a tingling sensation on your finger, to electrocutaneous stimulation which could also be compared to shock therapy. Some of the results have shown that it's very shocking and not been very successful so far. But that continues to be an area where we look at direct stimulation of the nerves and direct stimulation of the muscles to tell a human what the forces that the robots are seeing.
But up until now those have been sort of bad-science experiments. I'm sure the researchers don't believe that, but it's not ready to be used on a daily basis with an operational system.
So the types of devices that we have in the lab now are are the vibratory systems, which basically tend to make your fingers numb after a while, and then we also have one device that kind of straps onto the back of your hand and has tendons which exert force, and so as you close your hand, the tepidons pull against your hand and exert force that way. And those are okay. The problem is that you don't want to put so much external devices on a human that it now becomes difficult for them to do the dask, and that's why I say that the direct method of stimulating nerves and muscles is ultimately what we're going to have to do but we're still a long ways away from understanding how to do that without damaging cells and making humans uncomfortable. Okay?
NASA Moderator: Okay. Sounds good. Riley asks -- and this is a related question -- "Why design a hand when it seems to make a replaceable (wordd) attacher such as you place what tool (wordd) --
Scott Askew: That's an excellent question. That's been a big debate in the early days of Robonaut is there's only so many things that the human hand can do, and humans would not have evolved very far if they hadn't figured out how to make tools and how to use tools. And so one of Robonaut's goals is to be ible to use the same tools as humans, and so astronauts have a huge number of tools that have been specifically developed for them to work with in space. And Robonaut will use those same tools, and so if you want to think about the amount of tools you have in a standard tool kit, there might be 50 or a hundred tools. And if Robonaut needs to change out its tool mechanism each time, it becomes somewhat laborious.
And actually there's a robot that was built around the same time as Robonaut that took the opposite strategy, which said we're not going to build the dextrous hand, we're going to build a special end affector tool for every new task we have to do. And so that was a difference in philosophy. Our philosophy was, using the existing tools that are there rather than to have to develop a specific robotic tool for every application where you want to -- because our task was to do the same tasks that EVA astronauts are already doing. So we already had a set of tools readily available. All we needed to do was to be able to interface with them, and the Robonaut hand gave us that, and it gives us a lot more, because now this dextrous hand can do many other tasks besides just grab these tools. It can work with very small objects and it has a very fine sense of touch, and so those things are what make it unique, and by no means is it the only solution, but it's the solution that we chose because of the goals that we had in mind. And there have been many people that saw the Robonaut hand and said, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Why would anybody want to build a five-fingered robot hand?" Well, once they've seen it operating and doing tasks for the last two or three years, they've become a lot quieter and start to see that it does have a lot of potential that fixed-purpose robot -- or fixed-tool robots don't really have.
And so that's one of its unique features, is that dexterity, the multiple fingers and multiple arms allow it to do things that most other robots will never be able to do.
NASA Moderator: I had a couple of people comment that it's human like and makes the human body make sense, doesn't it?
Scott Askew: Well, especially when you want to interact with things that humans work with. If you were going to design from scratch something that was going to be robotically controlled, you probably wouldn't build a robotic hand, or a human equivalent robotic hand. But because of what we're trying to do, we think it makes sense, and we've had a lot of success with it, and after this time, we haven't -- we haven't wanted to get rid of it and go get a special-purpose tool for each task. So we believe we picked a good strategy. It seemed to work for us so far. But that's only for this application. For other applications, it definitely is not the best approach.
NASA Moderator: Okay, great. Naornian, I believe -- sorry if I'm mispronouncing the name -- asks, "What security measures have been taken to assure that Robonaut's program can't be tampered with?"
Scott Askew: Well, that's a good question. For the first several years of Robonaut's life, it was developed in a lab, and those networks, the computer networks that the Robonaut was developed on were completely isolated from the Internet, and so the only people that had access to them were the people in the lab that wrote the software and made all the algorithms for the Robonaut to work. In the past, and now we havy involved just in the past few weeks, this past month, we actually operated Robonaut, teleoperated Robonaut from Washington, D.C. We ran a few experiments locally from Houston, we went to a remote site at a different location, you know, five or ten miles away, and we had the teleoperator wear the same equipment that they normally wear in the lab, and they were able to operate Robonaut without too much perceived difference between the laboratory environment and where they were a few miles away.
Now, when we went to Washington, D.C., I don't think we got a very good Internet connection, and the operator there had a very slow -- or a very poor connection for the video. And so if you try to imagine doing a task with no sensation and you're half blind, then that's about how well we did our tasks that day. But we're just starting to experiment with running Robonaut over the Internet, which means we now have opened up some communication between our laboratories and the Internet.
Our networks are probably not 100% secure, but we have people whose full time jobs is to make the network secure, and we always make backups of everything. You all should learn that by now, is that it's good to have a backup so in case somebody either -- one of us makes a mistake and messes it up or somebody figures out a way to get into our networks, we always have backups, and so everything is secure no matter what. As long as somebody can't take over Robonaut -- and we have enough local control of Robonaut that if somebody were to take over the commands and tell it to do something bad or stupid, the local controller would know to stop Robonaut and keep it safe. So even if it was a bad operator or somebody sending bad commands, the local control would prevent Robonaut from executing those commands and injuring itself. And so we -- we always maintain safety as part of the Robonaut's operation. It tries to protect itself and it tries to protect the humans that are in the environment.
One of the things that makes -- another thing that makes Robonaut different is we like to think of it as inherently safe, meaning when Robonaut's moving at full speed, it's moving about this fast. And so any human that has a heartbeat can probably move out of that path of motion, and even if Robonaut touches you, it's not going to hurt you or bruise you. It might run into you, and if for some reason you've got -- you've got between it and something hard, it might push against you, but it doesn't have -- it's not really strong, so it wouldn't -- it wouldn't really hurt you. It might be uncomfortable for a little bit, but Robonaut is not able to do a karate chop or a -- throw a baseball really fast. So a lot of robots will move extremely fast and do things at light speed that humans can't. Robonaut is not designed to do things extremely fast. It's designed to be able to do many things well and to have that dexterity and flexibility. (Coughing.) Excuse me. Like I said, I don't usually talk all afternoon or at least for an hour continuously.
Okay, I hope that answered your question.
NASA Moderator: Okay. As a matter of fact, I think you've got a couple of other questions while you were at it.
Scott Askew: Uh-oh.
NASA Moderator: No, that's great. Cybernetica wants to know whether the robot -- or the Robonaut will completely autonomous without being constantly remote controlled?
Scott Askew: Well, like I spoke about in the presentation, that's one of the future goals, but right now the computer algorithms we have are not good enough to make Robonaut a permanent autonomous robot. The amount of autonomy that we've been able to achieve is the ability to do what would be sort of a simple, a very simple task, a linear task. "I need to do this and this and this and this." So -- and there's a few more steps in there. But to get -- to recognize a wrench, to grab the wrench, to hand -- find out where the human is, understand where the human is, hand the wrench to a human, and then release the wrench, that's a fairly primitive task, and, you know, most three- or four-year-olds can do that type of task. So not many three- or four-year-olds are autonomous, and so we like to think of Robonaut as growing or evolving, and maybe not in a year it will be like a four-year-old, but maybe in five years it will be like a six- or seven-year-old. So it will gradually improve, but unless -- unless we get really smart quick, it will probably advance a little bit slower than a human. Okay?
NASA Moderator: Okay. Brad wants to know what uses could Robonaut have in everyday life?
Scott Askew: That's good. I should put out that question to you. Because if you had a Robonaut in your house, what would you have it do? And when I speak different places that's one of the things I like to say is, what would you have this robot do? Now, there have been movies out with androids and different cybernet type of robots that are, you know, based in the future and the robots do different things. It really depends. It depends on how you want to use them. I mentioned earlier that Robonaut can do things that are unsafe for humans, and so that's one area that we see Robonaut having a lot of potential is areas that are hazardous to humans and that are very high risk that you don't want to risk a human life, then Robonaut can easily take on that -- take on that role.
Another thing it can do is things that are soft -- well, Robonaut is not a good repetitive task Robonaut since it's not a high speed robot, but things that are not challenging and basically things that humans don't really enjoy doing, that's the type of work that we intend to do for spacecraft in the space program is those tasks that humans can -- would easily give up, things -- the routine maintenance operations. You know, if you had a robot to take out your garbage or to mow your lawn, it's probably not the best robot to mow your lawn, but there's a lot of different tasks that humans don't enjoy doing, for whatever reason and we all want to pay somebody else to do them, so here's another thing that Robonaut could do.
Robonaut could be an assistant to someone that needs physical assistance. So Robonaut's arms could pick up things. So maybe you wouldn't need all of Robonaut. Maybe Robonaut's -- one Robonaut arm could be attached to a wheelchair for a person that's disabled, and Robonaut's arm could reach out and pick up things for that person rather than them having to have an assistant around.
So it could enable people that don't have upper-body mobility to do that. And we've talked with people in the prosthetics industry, and they've looked at the Robonaut technology and have discussed licensing of the patents and stuff like that.
And so we're very open to how other people would use this on earth.
Our job is to make robots for space. And how other people want to use them here on earth, we're very open to helping that move along. And however we can do that, fine, but that's not our primary goal.
So the question is open-ended. How will robots like this be used on earth? Nobody knows. It's really up to our imaginations and people working to do that.
So that's a very good question. And I think in the next, oh, five or ten years that you will start to see more and more robots, they're not going to be humanoids right away, but there will be vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, there's already been some of that, but there will be more and more special purpose machines or robots that will do things that humans aren't particularly interested in doing. And Robonaut has some potential or a humanoid robot has some potential to do things that are hazardous or help people that need assistance.
NASA Moderator: Okay, great. And speaking of helping people that need assistance, Brian wants to know, "Are you considering using Robonaut for rescue missions during emergency situations?"
Scott Askew: Well, that's a good question. Since Robonaut is not extremely fast and not extremely strong, you'd have to understand what type of task you're having Robonaut go into. But certainly an emergency situation, or a hazardous situation -- sometimes emergencies could pose a potential risk for somebody who's been in an auto accident, where the people around them aren't injured, but the emergency is for the person that may be trapped in a car. So it really depends on the type of emergency and what assistance you need. If Robonaut had super-human strength, then it certainly might go rip the door off a car and help the human get out. But Robonaut right now is not that strong. And so you'd have to build a robot that had that type of strength if you wanted to be able to get a car open, or, you know, pick something up really heavy, you name it.
And those are the types of challenges that will face people that want to make robots, or machines that help humans here on earth, is some of them will have to be strong, some of them won't be just like Robonaut, they may need to be really strong, whereas Robonaut has the ability to kind of fit in the midrange. It's not really strong, it's not really speedy, but it does things in between. It can do things very small, and it could do things pretty big. So it can pick up a pretty wide range of tools that humans are used to picking up, but not microscopic things, and not really big things that humans usually need, you know, forklifts or cranes to pick up big things. So Robonaut is not going to do those big things, either.
NASA Moderator: Okay, great. Dan asks the question after apologizing because he's only missed some of the video and he's afraid maybe you've answered this.
Scott Askew: That's fine.
NASA Moderator: "referring to humanoid robots, or the Robert Asimo, have you worked in conjunction with scientists who do tricks and can improve efficiency, also anything you can learn from the Asimo project or vice versa?"
Scott Askew: Oh, there's a tremendous amount we could learn, and I wish we had done more. In part of presentation I talked about the human interface experiments, and one of the researchers was from the Japanese space agency, or NASDA, and she was here on a one-year rotation or transfer. She came to our laboratories and works with us for a year. We would like to have the same opportunity to work with them in Japan, but we have not worked directly -- if you remember, Asimo is developed by the Honda motor company, the same people that make cars and motorcycles and motor boats and whatever else. As far as they see it, they're developing a commercial product, and they have kept their technology very secret. They've shown a lot of videos, but they haven't published a lot of information. Robonaut, we publish -- I won't say we publish every bit of information, but every year we write probably a dozen articles that are published for different journals or conferences or publications, engineering technical type things, and some of them are even, you know, we've had articles about humanoids in Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and so there's lots of information out about Robonaut. Most of what's come out about Asimo has been more in the marketing and advertising, and so you may know as much about Asimo as we do. We've all looked at the web sites and seen the videos and read that type of information, but we don't have a whole lot of in-depth technical information.
We do expect to see in the next few years their robot to sprout some hands. We've heard that they are investing a large amount of money in developing some of the dexterity that we started with. That was our goal to begin with was to create the upper-body dexterity. They focused on bipedal motion, a robot that can walk. They decided that that was very important, and they've done very well with that. I'm very impressed with the work that they've done. We -- if we could take their lower body and merge it with our upper body, that would be a tremendous robot that could do a wide range of things.
There's a lot of other people, we've heard that the Chinese are working on a Robonaut project, and there have been many, many different humanoid type robots that have been built all around the world -- the Koreans, Japanese, and the Germans have a large program, and they're also building a humanoid type robot, or Robonaut. I think Robonaut is now becoming a class of robot and not a specific robot. So it's a robot that helps an astronaut, and that's what a Robonaut, it's a robotic astronaut, so works in space and works on the types of tasks that humans would work on.
So I guess the answer -- the short answer was "no." But we definitely keep in touch with all the information we can, and we wish that it was more open because they have done a tremendous amount of work.
And I freely admit that the Japanese are some of the best in miniaturization in the world, and that's one of the challenges that we've had in this project is to make everything fit inside the robot. Being in charge of the electronics, I've spent many a night trying to figure out how to fit certain electronics up inside the joints so that we don't have a big box sticking out of Robonaut's back or head or, you know, whatever part of Robonaut. We've tried to keep it all inside the body so it looks as much like the shape of an astronaut or the shape of a human as possible.
We -- one of the things we want to do when we started this was the size of Robonaut could not exceed that of a -- an astronaut in a space suit, and so if it got bigger than an astronaut in a space suit then Robonaut couldn't do the same tasks that that astronaut could. So we've tried to keep all the parts as compact as possible, and miniaturization is a big part of that. So we could learn a lot from them in that area, too.
NASA Moderator: Okay, we're going to start to wrap up here, but Matthew asks, "How many lower halves have been tested with Robonaut?"
Scott Askew: I'm sorry, I didn't get that question. Could you repeat it?
NASA Moderator: Yes. He's asking "'s, "How many lower halves have been tested with Robonaut?"
Scott Askew: It's lower something. I didn't get that word.
NASA Moderator: The lower part of the body is what they're interested in.
Scott Askew: Oh. Oh, the lower body. Right now the only part that has been built and tested to date is the waist or torso, the ability to move its upper body. There's no -- there's no legs, there's no -- well, we're building the stabilizing leg, but it hasn't been tested yet. And so big part of Robonaut is its upper body. And that still continues to be our focus. We think that is where the work gets done, and that will still continue to be probably, you know, 75 to 80% of our focus is on how to improve the upper body dexterity, and then the lower body will depend on where you want to use it. Is it going to be on a spaceship, is it going to be on a planetary rover, is it going to be here on earth? And so we're not trying to figure those things out as much right now as the upper body part, which we see as very important, and that's -- that's pretty much our niche and the contribution that we've made is to make what we see as the best upper-body dexterity robot in the world.
NASA Moderator: Okay, terrific. I'm going to close with one from Dan in which he asks, "What are the specific things you might have learned from this project that might help budding hobby roboticists?"
Scott Askew: I don't think I have enough time to answer that one. That's a very open-ended question. Well, let's see. There's a lot of things, but I would just say, one of the things that I've learned is take the time to do it right the first time. Even though you think you're in a hurry and you really want to get this thing running and see how it works, give yourself enough time to think it through and tinker with it a little bit. Give yourself some experimentation time so you don't have to know exactly how it's going to work when you start going. You can start down the path and you can tinker with it a little bit. And then you'll figure it out as you go. But nobody knows exactly how it's going to be when they start, and even after you've finished it once, you'll have 20 or 30 different things you'll want to change next time.
But the fact that you did it, you actually built something and made it work is the most important thing, rather than spending all your time thinking about it, or not even being afraid to try it, because you might fail. That's the big thing is to try it and keep at it long enough so that you actually succeed.
If we'd only worked on Robonaut for a year, we wouldn't have had a whole lot to show for our work. We'd have a hand sitting on a bench and an arm, you know, off next to it, and now that we've been able to keep working on it over these last few years, we've got the entire upper body working, and now we're building another Robonaut that will have the stabilizing leg and be able to leave the lab. It will go different places and be tested in different areas. So just give yourself enough leeway to experiment, and don't be afraid to fail because that's where all the learning is. All those things you think are bad are really learning things that you'll be glad you learned in the future.
And so if you start doing things now, by the time you're as old and decrepit as I am, you'll be two or three times as smart as me and you'll be building robots even better than Robonaut. So I look forward to seeing that when I'm sitting around in a wheelchair. Maybe I'll have a robot that you built help me do sole things.
NASA Moderator: Okay. Thank you very much, Scott Askew for joining us, and on behalf of the robotics education project, I want to thank all of the students out there who sent in their great questions. This is a fascinating subject today. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Scott Askew: Thank you.
(End of presentation.)