NASA has got its sights firmly set on a manned mission to Mars in the very near future and creations like the Valkyrie 1, which is described by Project and Group Lead at NASA’s Dextrous Robotics Lab Nicolaus Radford as a “superhero robot”, will be instrumental in paving the way for human explorers.
The Valkyrie robot is being designed to be a self-contained unit, carrying its own power pack and doing most of the computing within the robotic shell. The robot is also modular, for the most part and limbs can be easily swapped in case of damage while the arms specifically can be quickly reconfigured to switch a left arm for a right and vice versa. Valkyrie is also teeming with cameras, as well as sonar embedded in the chest near the Tony Stark lighting effect. It’s not autonomous however, it will have a controller so all of that easy-to-fix design probably won’t be turned against us in the Robot Revolution.
Near the end of the video above, you can see the tethered Valkyrie performing simple tasks in the lab while Nicolaus Radford explains how robots like the one seem here will prepare for a human mission to places like Mars. It looks like it still needs some extra design work but Stuff can totally see its ancestors assembling a human habitation on the red planet some day.
Source: IEEE Spectrum (YouTube) via PopSci