Mars will most likely be the next giant leap for mankind
but it's not certain that the feet that will step onto it will belong to a man
or a woman. The development of the Robonaut, humanoid robots that will go to
Mars in our place is well underway some experts say they are cheaper safer and
more effective and sending humans to the Red Planet
so will a living breathing person ever set foot on Mars?.
It was difficult enough getting to the moon just 239,000 miles or 385,000
kilometers away from Earth that's nothing compared to a 34 million miles
or 55 million kilometers distance to Mars and that then its closest approach
get the timing wrong and that increases to nearly 250 million miles or 400
million kilometers. Since 1960 there have been 55 missions to the red planet of
those 25 have failed, another four of partially failed eight machines
remain in operation on or around Mars with the opportunity Rover launched in
2003 the Curiosity rover launched in 2011 being the only operational robots
on the planet. In the skies above Mars there are six orbiters monitoring the
weather and geological patterns but all those are pretty old tech, within the
next two decades it's hoped that the exploration of Mars will be taken over
by robonaut's. Engineers have been working on human shaped robots but offer
all the advantages of the latest technology plus the ability to work
alongside humans humanoid machines can be used to simulate the experience of
humans in extreme conditions offering more information on how to protect
people if they should ever go there. One of the key developments in robonaut's
was a ASIMO unveiled by the Honda corporation in 2000. ASIMO is the size of
a twelve-year-old boy and capable of walking running and even dancing like a
human. Technology took a huge leap forward as a result of the DARPA
Robotics Challenge contest which took place between 2012 and 2015.
Entries were invited that could complete eight tasks focused around
search-and-rescue operations on earth including been able to drive a vehicle,
walk across rubble, open doors, climbing ladders and use tools. The contest led
to creation of androids that could pick themselves up if they fell over
communicate using speech recognition and facial expressions and move in a
realistic human way. But NASA's Robonaut series appear to have achieved the most.
They were built with the idea of working in space alongside humans in mind.
Robonaut 1 came in two versions between 1997 and 2002 and explored the use of
teleoperation. They could be remotely controlled by a
user who was elsewhere due to its human-like hands and arms it
didn't need specially designed tools and to use the ones that astronauts you but
R1 was basically a torso that could be a attached to a base with wheels so it wasn't
fully capable of human motion. Neither was R2 but the later model
proved so successful but it was flown to the International Space Station in 2012.
The R2 began working on basic tasks through the use of telepresence a complex
system of cameras sensors and feedback suppliers that gave the remote operated
the feeling that they were actually there with the robot. R2 was designed to
be capable of moving and even working outside the ISS but the framework to
make it truly mobile wasn't supplied although it did get a pair of legs
later in to its mission. The latest Robonaut is the R5 also known as the
"Valkyrie" which was based on the search and rescue principles of the DARPA
contest but also with the exploration of Mars in mind. Four Valkyries have been
built, each Valkyrie is 6 feet tall, weighs 300 pounds, 150 kilos and costs around $2
million dollars to build. Each contains nearly 200 sensors, 5 feedbacks and 28
torque control joints to mimic human movement but there are still problems
with sending robonaut's to Mars. Latency is the biggest one, it takes three and a
half minutes that the shortest distance between Earth and Mars and 22 minutes at
the longest distance for a signal to go just one way and in the same amount of
time to return. That rules out real-time
operation by telepresence it's hoped that improvements in artificial
intelligence will help solve a problem although it won't cure it completely.
Cost is another issue, sending a robot to Mars instead of a human is cheaper
because a robot doesn't need life support systems or supplies that a
person does and it doesn't need to come back to earth but one of the main
reasons the Apollo missions to the moon were funded was because people were
going. The human adventure made the prospect exciting for public and the
international tensions of the space race era meant there was political and
military adavntages to covering the costs. If we're not sending men to Mars
who wants to pay for it as professor Stephen Hawking said in 2009 "Robotic
missions do not catch the public imagination in the same way and they do
not spread the human race into space which should be a long-term strategy. We
will have the world go where no one has done before ". It's also not fully accepted
that robots are better than people in the first place along with the speed of
human decision-making and reaction it's argued that people are more cost
effective when you evaluate how much scientific information they retrieve
per dollar spent. In 2005 the UK's Royal Astronomic Survey Commission on the
scientific case for human space exploration discussed the topic. They
argued that in 1972 the astronauts of Apollo 17 traveled 36 kilometers across
the moon service while the Opportunity Rover was taken eight years to cover
almost the same distance on Mars. They pointed out that with no return
requirement for robots, no material from the surface of Mars had yet been brought
back to earth compared to nearly 400 kilograms of moon samples. In 2007 an
experiment took place at the Haughton impact crater in Canada where a human in
a spacesuit worked alongside a robot operated by telepresence. In the test
the human was found to be between 10 and 100 times more effective than
the machine which was more advanced than anything on Mars.
At the time Steve Squyres, who was part of the opportunity team admitted that
most things a rover could do in a day could be done by a human in less than a
minute. It was also argued that the robot
missions weren't getting cheaper as expected it's always been assumed that
the miniaturization of technology would make growth smaller and lighter but as the
need to discover more specific information increased the type of
experiments we need then became heavier and the probes actually became bigger and
therefore more expensive to send. So robot or human, or robot and human.
It looks like the robonaut's could go to Mars first to pave the way for humans
then when humans arrive they'll work alongside their automated friends. But
there is a compromise option, instead of going all the way to Mars astronauts
might set up base on one of the planets moons Phobos or Deimos then send robots
to the surface to be operated by telepresence from a much closer distance
than Earth. But the idea of humans going nearly all the way to Mars and not quite
getting there perhaps for decades afterwards even
gonna sit well with the fans of human adventure and ultimately the ones
bankrolling the missions. Meanwhile the next stage of robotic development could be
unveiled shortly with the final round of NASA's space robotic challenge. 20
teams will compete to operate the virtual Valkyrie robot in a Martian
environment complete with the latency issues they would have to face in real
life. The winning team gets a million dollars but the advance in the fields of
Robotics is the real prize. So thanks for watching and I'll just like to say that
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