Back in July of last year, crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) received a very special payload of devices from Google’s Advanced Technologies and Projects team. The prototype devices, codenamed Project Tango, were meant for NASA’s microsatellites, the SPHERES, that have been accompanying the astronauts on their voyage around the planet since 2006.
I recently had the incredible luxury of corresponding with Maria Alberty of the Ames Research Facility, the group inside of NASA in charge of overseeing the SPHERES and their experiments, with the goal of revisiting Project Tango’s involvement with the SPHERES and adding to the continuity of Talk Android’s reporting on this milestone.
Last year, Talk Android’s Jared Peters and Jeff Causey had reported on the events leading up to the Google prototypes being delivered to the ISS (which you can view here and here for some great back-story), with Brendan Lynch delivering the most recent article discussing Project Tango’s upcoming departure to the space station. It was from their work and my own personal interest that most of my knowledge of the whole Project Tango affair was derived.
It was not enough. Poor Maria really had to get me on the same page before we could even start discussing Project Tango…
Maria initially guided me, gently, through the background of what SPHERES are and what they are after a device, like the Project Tango prototype, is added (dubbed “Smart” SPHERES).
The microsatellites called SPHERES (an acronym for Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites) are, as NASA describes them, bowling-ball sized instruments that provide a test-bed for research and development in the field of multi-body formations, flying, multi-spacecraft control algorithms, and free-flying physical and material science investigations. These satellites are used as a platform for these experiments inside the unique environment offered in the ISS.
These SPHERES are, as Maria says, self-contained. They each have their own units of power, propulsion systems, basic computers, navigation equipment, and adapters and ports that allow researchers to upgrade them to test specific investigations.
[SPHERES] are used inside the space station to test a set of well-defined instructions for spacecraft performing autonomous rendezvous and docking maneuvers. Basically SPHERES can act alone, or with the addition of other hardware mounted to SPHERES act as a free-flying platform that is capable of accommodating varying mounting features and mechanisms in order to test and examine the physical or mechanical properties of materials in microgravity.
It’s these adapters that allowed SPHERES to have their first taste of being “Smart”. In 2011, on the final flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, NASA rocketed up a Google Nexus S (designed by Samsung) to be plugged into the SPHERES. The Nexus S was the first commercial smartphone to be approved for use and to fly aboard the ISS.
D.W. Wheeler, lead engineer in Ames’ Intelligent Robotics Group, said at the time: “By connecting a smartphone, we can immediately make SPHERES more intelligent. With the smartphone, the SPHERES will have a built-in camera to take pictures and video, sensors to help conduct inspections, a powerful computing unit to make calculations, and a Wi-Fi connection that we will use to transfer data in real-time to the space station and mission control.”
Jumping ahead to the summer of 2014, the Ames Research Facility created a new breed of Smart SPHERES by upgrading them with the Google Project Tango prototype.
As was covered in the media, researchers for the Project Tango-equipped Smart SPHERES set out with the goal of investigating the effects of giving the SPHERES three-dimensional awareness via the prototype’s 3D sensor capable of creating a three-dimensional model of its environment.
Initially, NASA researchers had hoped that the upgraded Smart SPHERES would pave the way for a series of tasks that could be delegated out to the SPHERES. Mostly housekeeping-type tasks, the researchers envisioned video surveys for safety audits, noise level measurements, and air flow and quality assessments, all of which must be routinely performed by the ISS crew members.
While not divulging specific experimental results, both past or ongoing, of Project Tango’s involvement with the SPHERES, Maria did state that the current batch of Project Tango Smart SPHERES would be succeeded by next-generation free-flying robots.
The Project Tango experiment was the last test session of “Smart SPHERES”. During the past three years, “Smart SPHERES” has provided valuable engineering data regarding the use of a free-flying robot on the Space Station. Based on this data, NASA has started developing a next-generation free-flying robot, which will be deployed in 2017-2018.
She went on to reiterate that the next generation of robots are a new project of Ames, implementing the data and analyses garnered from Smart SPHERES. These robots are still in the preliminary research phase.
So what could the Ames Research Facility be cooking up next? We’ll have to wait and see, but Maria did indicate that, up until this point, Google has not had any involvement with Ames’ use of Project Tango.
For me, it’ll be a tough two years while I wait to see what Ames assembles with the Smart SPHERES data. In the meantime, I’ll just have to satisfy myself with all things related to the New Horizons spacecraft. What can I say, I love space-dwelling robots!
Come comment on this article: Exclusive: NASA recaps Project Tango-equipped Smart SPHERES, hints at next-generation of free-flying robots
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