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IBM Is Sending a Floating Robot Head to Space
[HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey] hasn't deterred Airbus and IBM from teaming up to develop CIMON (Crew Interactive MObile CompanioN), a floating robot the size of a medicine ball that is equipped with Watson AI technology.
Later this year, CIMON is set to become the first "flying brain" in space when it is deployed to the International Space Station (ISS) to work alongside astronauts.
CIMON will use its neural AI network, combined with its face and voice recognition technology, to assist astronauts during the European Space Agency's Horizons mission between June and October 2018.
Once the functional testing of the system has been completed, Gerst will work in Space with CIMON a total of three times: They will experiment with crystals, work together to solve the Rubik's cube and perform a complex medical experiment using CIMON as an 'intelligent' flying camera.
I → H
B → A
M → L
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 02 2018, @08:35PM (1 child)
Not the most clinching quote but “We are the first company in Europe to carry a free flyer, a kind of flying brain, to the ISS and to develop artificial intelligence for the crew on board the space station.”
I doubt they'd want to put a dumb terminal that depends on a data connection in the ISS, and the head is pretty large so I bet they stuffed a lot of processing and storage power in there, although some space must be allocated for the navigation system.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 02 2018, @09:00PM
If the robot head is limited to the tasks listed in the Airbus article, then they could probably get away with making it a dumb terminal and adding a couple of seconds of latency. I assume that Watson-like assistant technology could work using smaller hardware in the future. Future stations like the Deep Space Gateway might get their own "supercomputers" (although there will be significant restraints on power and cooling).
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