Human presence in space is massively expensive and there is a limit to what can be done remotely.
Professor Yang Gao
“This offered a unique opportunity for me,” says Professor Gao. “At the time, the space industry was waking up to the fact that to make a real impact, spacecraft needed to become more intelligent. Human presence in space is massively expensive and there is a limit to what can be done remotely.”
Fourteen years later, the space industry’s vision is to develop advanced robots which can repair satellites, assemble telescopes and manufacture equipment, and space rovers which can survey environments and extract resources.
Professor Gao says: “Surrey’s space research philosophy has always been to push the boundaries with a low-cost, miniaturised approach, and this applies very well in the space robotics area. For example, we’ve developed a visual perception technique which has minimised the computational power needed to sample data while retaining a good performance.”
Another concept pioneered at Surrey is ‘reconfigurable autonomy’ – where a robot can self-adapt and make autonomous decisions based on the environment it encounters. Like many space robotics technologies, this lends itself to other hazardous environments, and is already being used in the nuclear industry to sort and segregate nuclear waste.
Sometimes, inspiration for Professor Gao and her team comes from the natural world, such as the way insects go about their daily tasks. She explains: “A wood wasp can penetrate three metres into wood to lay its eggs using a traction movement. Emulating this technique, we’ve developed a new type of space drill which uses traction. This differs from conventional drills, based on rotation, which are very problematic in low gravity because of the heavy overhead load required.”
These technologies are being further developed within the FAIR-SPACE hub and will be some of the building blocks for an exciting new era of space exploration. One important goal for FAIR-SPACE will be to help build the infrastructure for ‘Moon Village’, which the ESA aims to develop by 2030. This will be mankind’s first permanent base on the Moon from which to explore scientific research, mining – and even tourism.
Asked whether it is realistic to think that humans will ever live anywhere but Earth, Professor Gao says:
“I think so. We are natural explorers and have a history of going and finding new frontiers on different continents. To me, going to space is just a natural extension of this. Our growing population and limited resources will drive us to live elsewhere – and robotics will play a big part in this journey.”
Main image courtesy of
nasa.gov
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