An AI-powered robot with a digital face is ready for a new mission on the International Space Station.
The robot, called CIMON-2 (it’s short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) worked alongside two European astronauts on past missions to the station in recent years and just got a software upgrade that will enable it to perform more complex tasks with a new human crewmate later this year.
The cute floating sphere with a cartoon-like face has been stored at the space station since the departure of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano in February 2020. The robot will wake up again during the upcoming mission of German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who will arrive at the orbital outpost with the SpaceX Crew-3 Dragon mission in October.
In the year and a half since the end of the last mission, engineers have worked on improving CIMON’s connection to Earth so that it could provide a more seamless service to the astronauts, CIMON project manager Till Eisenberg at Airbus, which developed the intelligent robot together with the German Aerospace Centre DLR and the LMU University in Munich, told Space.com.
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