00:22What if we told you that these robots are being controlled from space, 400 kilometers above Earth?
00:32From the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Johnny Kim is guiding a team of robots here on the ground.
00:42This is all part of an experiment called Surface Avatar, a collaboration between ESA and the German Aerospace Center .
00:51Its goal? To explore how astronauts can command robotic teams from space,
00:57giving us the tools to one day explore the Moon and Mars together.
01:04The first part of the experiment involved retrieving sample containers scattered across a simulated Martian landscape,
01:11built at DLR's facilities in Germany.
01:19ESA's four-legged robot Spot navigated the terrain autonomously, locating and collecting the samples.
01:26ESA's five-legged possibilities.
01:28ESA's five-legged robots, or a lone robot, currently trying to see the
01:49design of the Moon and the moon and the moon again.
01:50And they מב Patient Noelle's three-legged robots.
01:55And they were still in the early days.
02:00At a handover station, Johnny took over, supervising DLR's humanoid robot, Roland Justin, by selecting
02:08and combining high-level commands from a predefined set.
02:12He guided Justin through the steps needed to transfer the samples to a lander.
02:32In this kind of scenarios, we can control the robots as our avatars, either to remote-operated
02:39autonomous commands to execute certain tasks.
02:42Next came a simulated cave exploration.
02:47ESA's interact rover transported a smaller robot dog, Bert, to the cave entrance.
02:53A boulder blocked the way.
02:55Johnny used Interact's robotic arm to remove the obstacle and place Bert on the ground.
03:05But things didn't go smoothly on purpose.
03:09In a simulated malfunction, Bert detected one of its legs was damaged.
03:15Johnny had to retrain the robot dog's walking algorithm in real time before it could continue
03:21into the cave.
03:22I think that obstacle has moved sufficiently for Bert to get in.
03:30Once fixed, Bert entered the cave and detected signs of ice, like we might find on Mars.
03:37These challenges are designed to test how astronauts respond when things don't go as planned.
03:43What was really important there is that the robot, it can still make mistakes during this complex
03:50task because it has to collect sample tubes, bring it somewhere else, navigate, and to make
03:57this entire task autonomous, it's really important that it can also recover from its own failures,
04:03and that it then can retry again.
04:07Behind the scenes, the team worked to ensure stable and secure communication between the robots on Earth and Johnny on
04:14the ISS.
04:17To really grab a big portion of the rocks, I kind of be strategic about what part of the rock
04:23I'm going to grab.
04:23The surface avatar experiment has advanced how humans and robots interact.
04:30We've made so many advances together, from working with a single robot, working with simpler modalities
04:38of commanding robots, to having much more complex robotic teams, as you can see here.
04:43And now, of course, the robots and the astronauts are separated by an orbiting spacecraft.
04:48But if you imagine in the future, the astronaut and the robot could actually go hand in hand
04:53and explore together, almost like a shepherd with its dog, so the astronaut could give voice commands.
05:00So we think through all of the scenarios and think that indeed humans and robots do well to explore together.
05:13We'll see you then.
05:14Bye.
05:15Bye.
05:20Bye.
05:25Bye.
05:26Bye.
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